The Persephone Project
by breadsticks
Summary: AU: Hibari rules the world of the walking dead with an iron fist. And Tsuna bumbles into it. 1827. Dedicated to PocketAces who mixed up the idea in my head.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Not mine.

0101010

The Persephone Project

0101010

It was like a mushroom in the distance. A mushroom of smoke and sand. It kept expanding and expanding until it was an ocean in the horizon.

The sea of smoke and sand engulfed them.

Tsuna lifted his arms to curl over his head as his crouched body tried to dig deeper into the ground. Through it all, a long continuous wailing pierced the air. He felt the pressure pushing his small body backwards, his feet making little grooves into the ground. He'd already closed his eyes against the turmoil and the screaming and the desperation.

Through it all, a long continuous cry resounded in the courtyard.

He started to realize he was the only one screaming. His hearing had closed as well. The other figures that had been with him, the whole entire crowd that had been called to the courtyard, they had all been swallowed by the fog of the explosion. He couldn't hear them anymore. He couldn't…do anything except huddle into himself as the sandpaper storm bruised his bare arms and drove him even further backwards.

His mouth closed against the onslaught and it cut short the hoarse voice and then his mind closed the door.

And just as suddenly, it stopped.

Gentle breezes began blowing again, the world picking up its pieces. And in the courtyard where there had been almost thirty people gathered to run and defy the law, now stood underneath the weight of a layer of sand and corpses. Granules of sand danced on the flesh that had tried to claw out.

The dogtag wrapped around a visible wrist clinked in the silence of the aftermath.

0101010

_Past Four Days…_

They had all barricaded themselves in the main building of the town hall. Outside, they could hear the slow determined scratchings of nails against wall. They _would not get in. They would not get in_. Tsuna repeated this mantra to himself while he clutched the rifle given to him by the newly elected scavenger scout, Longchamp. He'd laughed, grinned a little too wide, as he'd patted Tsuna's head while he shoved the gun into younger boy's trembling hands. Then he'd given Tsuna one of his lucky dogtags that he often hung around his neck.

It had a smiley face etched on. He'd wrapped it several times around his thin wrist. He really didn't like how sweaty it smelled.

Now, they were all watching Hana fiddling with the radio. They were waiting.

It crackled to life, "—emergency alert to the citizens, barricade yourselves in any way you can. The military units will be coming in to evacuate any of the remaining survivors in sectors nine, ten, and eleven. To the survivors in these areas, you are advised to stay on the roofs with as much supplies as you can carry. You will be much easier to see and rescue by the air units. We repeat, emergency alert—"

Tsuna rubbed the dogtag for luck and hope as the scratches underneath his fingerless leather gloves burned.

Luckily, this building was four floors tall. And they had locked every window and door possible in the place. Now, on the roof, under the blaring hot sun, they could look out and see the crowd of mottled gray bodies that surrounded their building. Tsuna resolutely looked at the horizon and avoided looking down on the writhing mass of dead bodies walking. They were dead. Dead. Dead. They weren't…real. She wouldn't be there. She wouldn't be because she was real, real in his mind, real in his memories as he watched her tap his nose in a mother's teasing. She wouldn't be down there with the unreal…things. He silently wondered where she was. Then he shrugged and figured she'd be with Iemitsu and Fuuta.

He avoided the question of why he wasn't with them.

He looked at the plump white clouds and avoided the scene on the ground where in desperation, three of _them _had ripped chunks of flesh from the arms of one of theirs and proceeded to stuff it down their faces with every enjoyment of eating rare steak after a famine. He'd known one of the three back when she'd…been alive. She'd been his geometry teacher who'd had an acerbic tone but had always made time to tutor him after class. When he'd passed his final exam by the skin of his teeth, she'd given him a bar of chocolate as congratulations. Now, the hunger had taken her. Now she wasn't real.

Tsuna rubbed nervously on the dogtag. He'd been stationed here, on the northeastern corner of the roof while a few of the others guarded different points on the roof. The others were making plans, in case…the military failed. He fingered the smile on the tag. His shift would be over in another hour or so. Really, he could take it. He could endure it. Even with this terrible consuming quiet in the landscape. Even with the upturned gray faces looking expectantly at them.

Their victim hadn't even screamed or fought back.

0101010

Several helicopters had come to sector eleven for them on the third day. They were taken to sector thirteen for temporary lodgings. There, the sergeant of their Rescue Operation told them they would be given medical check-ups for any contamination and if found clean would be given vaccines against the plague. Tsuna couldn't help but rub the dogtag even more when the sergeant said nothing about what happened to the…infected. The small scratches underneath his black gloves burned even now.

They were herded to one of the many large white tents all surrounded by one main electrical fence that reached up to twelve feet. Tsuna couldn't help but notice that there were dozens of cameras situated everywhere but very few actual guards who were armed to the teeth and kept a blank face at them.

This tent had a large symbol stitched onto its side, a circle with a dozen vertical lines inside with a horizontal line that cut through them in the middle. It looked like a logo of something but the sergeant didn't comment on it and Tsuna also ignored it, even when his neck felt cold with goosebumps.

Inside, three men in full white chemical protection suits shepherded them to the foldable chairs to wait. They were given forms to identify themselves to the government. And Tsuna wrote down what he could remember: name, address, age, no he couldn't really remember his social security number, telephone number, next of kin…

He paused.

Shrugging he wrote down _Nana, Fuuta, _and_ Iemitsu Sawada_.

Then _Contact Information of Next of Kin _came and he paused again. They'd left, hadn't they…? He listed _Escaped_.

When that was done and the forms were handed to one of the three men in white, they were given numbers and each would be individually called to a smaller partition of the tent for the check-up.

It burned hotter and Tsuna ignored it.

He wondered if he could run.

0101010

They'd taken away his gloves. And they'd seen it, the burning stigma. The scratches on his knuckles, deep white against the creamy skin.

They'd strapped a red hospital bracelet on him that said _Infected_.

One of them, a kindly looking old man peering at him through the gas mask, had let him have the dogtag secretly. The rest of his clothes had been burned. He didn't really care. They hadn't been his.

Longchamp had waved goodbye at him, arm a little too jerky, smile a little too wide again. He'd been wearing a clear plastic hospital bracelet.

Tsuna was then hustled off to a tent nearer the edge of the fence. In it, there were other people, like him, survivors with red bracelets. He couldn't help but notice that a lot more guards were around this area.

0101010

That night of the third day, an uprising was being planned.

The kindly looking old man, one of the white ones, had come in late at night with food and news. On the fourth day, they would be tossed out of the fenced area to the mercy of the…gray ones. The other healthy patients had already been transported to the safe sectors.

He'd also brought in vaccination shots. He wasn't sure if they would work on people already infected.

He explained to them that they needed to go to the courtyard tomorrow, the one in the middle of all of the tents. The guards had dwindled as a large number of them were escorting the healthy. He said to them, he could drug the remaining soldiers asleep. All they had to do was be at the courtyard tomorrow and they could then take one of the large army trucks to these coordinates, there's a hospital there, privately owned, which is damnably safe from the government, and he handed them a map with a line of red on it. The trucks are usually packed with supplies already, he informed them, so they could traverse that distance without much trouble.

0101010

It had gone off without a hitch.

Except for the mushroom that bloomed in the distance.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Not mine.

0101010

Naito Longchamp was jamming as many paperclips as he could into the left pocket of his lime green backpack. After having been hauled to the evacuation camp, he was just as quickly being army truck'd back to sector nine, lower class denizens.

He'd become an official orphan, shipped off to the disreputable sector 9, on the outskirts of the 'safe' sectors.

After just seven days of the Calamity, he'd lost everyone he'd ever known.

Well, no point of being sorry or anything. No point asking why he was the only one who survived or why this whole thing happened or why the government had only been barely able to contain the infection. No point. Silly questions, silly child, he chided himself. He could…He could scrape by what he could by scavenging in one of the nearby infected areas. That was it, yeah. He could scavenge some more. In fact, that was his official title or something. Scavenger scout, level two. Just like…back in sector 11.

All those…kids.

His fingers fumbled and a particularly striped green paperclip fell to the floor.

He bent down to grab at it. His dog tag slipped out, swinging in the humid air. All of his collection whittled down to this one last tag. He'd given so many away as good luck charms…

Then he heard the slow drag of feet against cement. And his cell beeped at him. Signal. Time to go. He swiped a few more notebooks since they were like gold now or something. And then he started to run swiftly and silently, eyes on the lookout for those damned.

And he ignored the slight memory that flashed inside his head, of nervous brown eyes and fingerless gloves and blood red bracelets.

No sense in clinging to the past. No sense crying. No sense. Nonsense. Non…

0101010

Tsuna woke up, blood curling around the curve of his cheek.

He lifted his head from the steering wheel and looked around where he was. Through the glass windows of the army truck, vague outlines of tall trees swam in a thick blue-tinged mist. Early morning, most likely. And on the dashboard, the map and the compass he'd taken from the old man—

_half-buried in sand, body crumpled into itself, skin burnt into a—_

And a door in his mind slammed shut and he realized he'd slammed the truck into a tree. He'd finally reached the boundaries of sector 13. He unfolded the map and traced the red line. Just a few more, he told himself. Just a few more.

He turned the key in the ignition slot behind the wheel. Nothing. Did it break immediately because of the crash? Or maybe, there wasn't any more gas? He checked behind the wheel for the control screen that was filled with a multitude of neon gauges, designed for complete and total control of the truck, the height and peak of military technology.

…

Which one was for the gas?

Three hours later, Tsuna was trudging through the forest, the fog choking out the sun, as if whole clouds had fallen to the ground and he was walking through them. A dark leather backpack hung from an aching shoulder, filled with what supplies he could cram down there from the truck.

Even sound was muffled here.

Underneath his skin crawled a thousand fears, doubts, and what-if's.

At least before, he could hear them. Heavy flesh dragging against granite…But now, all he could hear was his tired wheezing and the crunching of his sneakers over crumbling leaves and spindling roots. Why was it so silent? Where were the birds, the little woodland animals in all those cartoons? Weren't they supposed to be…crittering around and making noises?

Still.

It wouldn't be far now.

The hospital was just a few more notches away the map told him. Just a few more and at the end of the red line, the hospital stood like hope and safety and home. Maps didn't lie. They didn't. That's why they were maps, Tsuna reassured himself. To guide the lost and weary in the darkness…

And then Tsuna heard it, the damnable sound of teeth gnashing against flesh.

He started to physically shake, his vision blurring. Deep down his stomach was burning, boiling, but he was so c-cold. Where was it? Where was—Could it have seen him already? Could it have smelled his fear? No, no, the sound kept continuing, no break. It hadn't.

He had to, to, the shaking was so bad, he had to hold onto a tree. His knees were buckling, failing.

He couldn't run.

And the pit of fear steadily yawned over his mind, inching wider and wider to swallow him whole. And that crunch of bone and that easy hiss of teeth, blunt teeth sliding into sk-kin…it went on and on.

He had to get away. He had to leave right now. Who-whatever it w-was, they were busy. They really wouldn't bother with him, would they? They wouldn't. He'd seen it before. Someone who'd, who'd thrown their own companion as some sort of defense. Some sort of trap or shield or—and Tsuna cringed at the thought. And the victim, the unlucky bastard who'd been pushed to the line of crawling shades, he'd just laid there, stunned and _hurt. _

And those walking dead had all stopped to feast on that one boy. They'd all stopped.

A choked sob came out of Tsuna's trembling chest, unwillingly.

The whole forest was quiet again.

They'd heard him.

Tsuna ran.

0101010

Hibari's feet slammed into the iced ground and sparks of frost flew.

He slid fluidly into a defensive crouch, both tonfas held out in front of his bleeding chest. The kreios cricked its neck in a round arc and its right mutated hoof swung low and pounded the ground, sending debris and man flying. Hibari's back hit an emaciated tree with a painful thud and he rolled quickly out of an oncoming stab of the titan's large left horn. It rammed against the bone-white tree into pieces. Hibari jumped and the kreios' head tried to follow and Hibari's scissored tonfas caught the horn with a _clang_. He pulled the steel rods closer and using that as leverage, swung his body around and kicked off the wrinkled snout with one leg, the other coming in an arc to smash into the monster's right temporal lobe.

The Darwin System's first axiom stated that the strong survive over the weak.

A ripple of pressure ran over the kreios' head and burst out at its left temporal lobe. Blood and fatty brain tissue rained down. The titan slumped and Hibari crouched down on its pronounced cheekbone and began to eat its face off, ripping strips of flesh and skin from bone.

His skin was colored a mottled arsenic gray.

The weak shall perish.

Through the rips on the battered shirt Hibari wore, burnished iron creaked.

0101010

A needle, sharp and ever keen, hit Tsuna's neck with pin-point accuracy. He crumpled to the ground. Several men came, running, slowing to a stop. One, a corporal, hit the rookie on the arm, "Tch. He's just a kid, you bastard." He snorted and resumed eating his rations, leather-like jerky. It had been their break in rotation when the newbie had looked up and started running after something. The corporal and the two other soldiers had followed.

The rookie stared down at the brunette they'd hit. His eyes found the red bracelet. He grunted, "Another one."

The corporal kept eating, thinking to himself. Sad. It was just a kid. Still a kid. "Put the gag and jacket on him. The doc's gonna be happy."

0101010

Through the lattice like maze of twisted metal spires that jutted from the broken pieces of pavement, Hibari screamed.

Perched on a ledge of one of the towers, Hibari's fingers dug into it and it groaned and the drilled in buttons began to pop out as the bar he'd been on bent inwards. Behind him, a monstrous shadow hung amidst the tangled cage of rust and cast steel. Every single skeletal skyscraper bent towards the captive titan, curving around him in loops and coils, a web of iron. Death to the old king.

Below, among the shadows of one thousand prison bars, indistinguishable shades jerked to attention. They climbed to their feet, swaying.

He kept screaming, gleaming teeth bared and face stretched thin and taut.

The Darwin System began.

0101010

Tsuna woke up, screaming and thrashing on the bed. He'd been put in a strait jacket, belts and buckles and strips of white crisscrossing his thin chest. And in his mouth, they'd put a gag, a ball-gag. It opened his mouth uncomfortably wide and filled it. Saliva was already leaking from the sides of his sore mouth, down his chin.

He began hitting his head against the wall, repeatedly smacking it with a repulsing wet thud.

A voice crackled into the room, a bored masculine voice, "Number Twenty-Seven, calm yourself. The jacket and the gag are merely safety precautions."

Tsuna did not stop, hitting his head against the wall. The door did not close and his memories came leaking back in torrents.

_How he'd acquired the scratches, reaching out to Nana who'd been infected, reaching out to stop her hands as Fuuta screamed in the background of utter horror and then struggling with her, and finally swinging his metal bat at her head, and blood splattered the floor and Fuuta kept screaming and Tsuna loosely held the metal bat now twisted looking down at his Nana, face peaceful, a large bleeding dent in her head, he'd ran, pulling on the wrist of a Fuuta who'd gone into shock._

_When he'd gotten to the town center building where the all the survivors were told to go to, he was hauled away from Fuuta to help in mowing down the remaining dead with a rifle given to him, after which he'd come back and had found someone had left Fuuta alone and Fuuta had gone off to shoot his own head. They'd had to throw his body out to the walking corpses._

"Number Twenty-Seven, calm yourself. The smoke is merely a sleeping sedative. It will help you calm down."

And the gray coils of Lethe spread throughout the room, closing the door, stopping the flood. Tsuna fell asleep again.

0101010

"Number Twenty-Seven, we know that you are awake." The patient did not stir from the bed beside the wall. The gag was gone but the jacket was still on him. "You have not eaten the rations we have provided for you." There on the floor at the foot of the bed, was a tray of uneaten food, a cup of rice and a smaller cup of vegetables and soup and on a tissue, a couple of bright colorful pills. Next to them, was a bloodied arm.

"We know that you are infected. We know the virus should have already moved. Even now, it spreads on your arms."

And they were right, damn them. The pale white scratches had elongated, stretched all the way to his elbows. Tsuna huddled more on the bed, farthest away from the small black camera on the wall. The strait jacket had been let loose, and his arms were free to move again. And on each wrist, handcuffs embedded into the skin, with biofeedback chips flashing away. Tsuna had seen the rivets puncturing his skin like a mockery of Shelley's monster.

Tsuna was not hungry. He did not want to eat.

They would not feed him anything else.

"It has been days, Number Twenty-Seven. If you do not cooperate, we will merely head on to the first of the procedures with you, weak from hunger. You are infected, Tsunayoshi. You must eat. You cannot deny this."

Tsuna ignored the threat.

"Are you still upset over the dog tag? It is not hard to order a search for it. And then we will forge it on your handcuff, if it pleases you."

Tsuna ignored the bribe.

0101010

"That pig-headedness is kind of cute."

Irie expelled a sigh. He ran a frustrated hand over messy ginger hair, "Please do not call Number Twenty-Seven cute, Byakuran-sama." He sniffed. "It will form attachments."

Byakuran's slitted eyes slid from the monitors to Doctor Irie behind his desk, full of stacks of folders and papers and three laptops. One lonely cup of coffee stood in the midst of it all, bewildered and half-drunk. "I suppose the doctor is right. But his orders are very difficult," Byakuran gestured at the monitors, "Look at that adorable thing. How can I not squish that? And he is one of the few that we have found, one of the few sentient survivors from that screw-up of Xinia's." His voice darkened at this. That bombing had taken out several significant bases and possible future specimens. Xinia had been the idiot in the government higher-ups who'd ordered the bomb. In the panic, no one had much objected to this.

Irie pushed up his glasses on his nose, "Of course Number Twenty-Seven is very valuable. I still must ask that you do not—"

"Do not mistake me for one of those government failures, Irie-chan. I am part of the Pantheon. We do not panic."

Irie did not speak, a little embarrassed. On the floors, the logo of the Pantheon was inscribed in red, a circle and inside it, a dozen vertical lines and a single horizontal line that cut through the rest. It seemed to dominate the room.

Byakuran spoke again, "I think I must thank the Heinlein Hospital. If this child hadn't been looking for it, our soldiers would never have stumbled on such a lovely little toy." The Pantheon did not believe in debts. It seemed someone had been sending their specimens to a safe house. The Heinlein Hospital would be in ruins next week. And their invalids returned, though Irie doubted this. Most likely, they were dead, slaughtered.

And that certain someone, the liars and betrayers in the organization, would be killed when found.

On top of one of the folders, a map with a line to the hospital lay.


	3. Chapter 3

AN: To all the readers, I'm sorry for the major lateness. My beta is kicking my butt again and helping me cull out the chaff in this story. Since it is extremely late, I feel sheepish in replying to all the reviewers so I'll just restrain myself to this note. Know that I read all the reviews and weep over them (creepy, I know) in gratitude. If you have questions, please pm me again. Or if you want to squeal with me, I'm open too. (Updated again to edit the last bits of Hibari's conversation with Tsuna.)

Warning for bits of pseudo-science and actual science and creature kinks.

Disclaimer: Not Mine.

0101010

Pantheon: (P.) n. "To improve humanity by careful bioengineering, to revolutionize the way of life by eradicating weaknesses, and to reach the heights of perfection possible via the use of the viral bio-chip to eventually bypass even death. We are the Pantheon, the goal of human evolution." Megacorporation spearheading several research companies and military bases in several districts. Oddly, only a handful of individuals own the Pantheon.

Titan: (S.) n. Abominations of the viral bio-chips. Unable to retain sanity or control. Lethal. Do not approach. Contact nearest Pantheon personnel.

0101010

When Tsunayoshi had been held in the white room, he remembered asking for a pencil from one of the orderlies. At the time, the only reason he could give was that he needed to write stuff down before he forgot them. The orderly had refused as per protocol and in a fit of resentment, Tsuna had thrown the tray back at his face. He'd misjudged the strength, of course. They had to bring the orderly out on a stretcher.

Tsuna had cried under his bed the whole night.

Again, he couldn't seem to sleep properly. The next morning, he found the pencil. In the commotion, it had rolled right by the wall shadowed by the edge of the bed. Tsuna tucked it into the lining of his bed and later asked the guard if the orderly was…okay.

He was, with only a slight concussion. He would be fine.

Tsuna's mutated strength waned and waxed like the moon, was laughingly compared by the nonchalant guard.

Tsuna felt so happy, so relieved, and yet so suffocatingly guilty. But he didn't dare show his tears in front of the camera. He cried again under the bed.

That next night, he was feverish. He crouched next to the walls, holding his stolen pencil with an awkwardly childish grip as if he had forgotten how to write. He remembered the frantic, almost desperate tears and the way he'd practically carved letters into the wall. He remembered the pencil shaking, and for a neurotic moment, he thought the pencil was alive and struggling to escape him. The funny thing was he didn't even remember what he was writing.

The next day he shut down.

He didn't twitch when one of the earlier guards combed his hair. He didn't whimper when one of the scientists jabbed him with the IV drip needle. He didn't so much as blink when even patient and logical Dr. Irie shook him in frustration. It was as if someone had cut off all the puppet strings on Tsuna.

0101010

Pvt. Lancia carted Tsuna onto the mobile hospital bed. He was careful not to hit Tsuna's head against the IV stand and not to pull out the IV needle either. He wrapped up Tsuna tightly with blankets, tucking them in, and then he began buckling the belts across the bed to keep Tsuna still. All the while, Tsuna didn't move. Tsuna didn't speak. Just stared at a corner of the room in a way that frankly raised the hair on Lancia's neck.

Dr. Irie had finally gotten sick of 27 staying in this room. He wanted Tsuna moved to one of the main labs now.

So Pvt. Lancia wheeled the bed out of the room as per orders.

Orders were absolute.

The room's walls were filled from top to bottom with strings of nonsense about pomegranates and doors closing and the One of Many Names. But for one corner, which Tsuna had left empty with only a lopsided smiley face that watched Pvt. Lancia's every move. It had an odd mark on its forehead and it was there that Tsuna was staring at, dead in all other aspects.

Dr. Irie said this was normal, shell-shock behavior for a victim. That with knowledge of death on the horizon, Tsunayoshi had felt the compulsive need to record even the littlest details of his last thoughts with such abundance and lack of reason that it was nigh incomprehensible.

The idea that Tsuna as a victim was painful. And not only because Tsuna was small and young and soft-looking.

But because deep inside Lancia, he knew who had caused all this. Knew who had hunted down and caged Tsuna like an animal in the forest. Knew who had handed 27 to the scientists on a silver collar.

He _was_ the bastard rookie in the forest.

0101010

Reborn stood on a rock outcrop in the arid desert, concentrating. His black-tipped claws were cupped in front of him, almost as if cradling something. His dark eyes closed, his breathing almost nonexistent. Then a spark of electricity jumped from his index finger to his right thumb. And like a dam overflowing, more sparks, more lightning streaks jumped and flew across the space his hands made. More and more so that it looked like Reborn was holding a miniature electrical storm in his hands.

Then Reborn's claws moved, as if weaving through the storm. Then Reborn smiled and said, "Come."

There in the horizon to the north, the ladon tunneled out of the barren ground, reminiscent of Dune's sandworms in ferocity and hunger. It barreled closer, diving in and out of the ground with an ease born of unnatural chemical strength. Then it burst out of the ground a few feet from Reborn and raised its head high in the sky enough to blot out even the sun. It opened its round mouth ringed with rows of blunt metallic teeth and began to sing.

An unearthly hollow song.

Reborn's claws moved again, prodding the storm in his hands and the titan swayed even as it sang.

It sang of lost companions, of a harsh and cruel world where their kind were being hunted down to extinction, of loneliness and emptiness in the struggle for existence. It was a beautiful song, harrowing and haunting.

Reborn cut through the storm and the ladon stopped singing, as if Reborn had physically cut off its voice.

Then Reborn opened his eyes, eyes inked black all over the sclera as if the pupils had widened and widened until it had swallowed the whole of his eyeballs like a growing black hole. He stared at the ladon that had killed hundreds of the human mortals in the continent and felt absolutely nothing. His claws clapped, smashing down on the electrical storm. He commanded once more, "Follow the jeep."

He turned around and was faced with his friend's frightened face.

Col. Nello's face quickly shut down, pulling the blinds on his fear but Reborn had seen it and caught it red-handed. Reborn did not often think on the differences between them. Aside from their polar appearances, their temperaments were quite similar in destructiveness and force. No, Reborn did not often think of the differences.

As if to dispel his previous fear, Col. Nello wrinkled his nose and said, "Do you have to feed him worms?"

"He _is_ my hatchling. What else am I supposed to feed him?" Reborn grinned, an empty smile as the black feathers in his hair twitched at the movement. "And hunger is the best spice for a new hatchling."

"Why don't you feed him some of the zombies? They're all over the place," said Col. Nello as he opened the door of the army jeep for Reborn.

"Those rotting carcasses?" Reborn sneered. "Don't be moronic. That's tantamount to infanticide. I won't sink that low."

"Shut up, creepy eyeball guy. I thought you could eat them?"

Reborn grunted. "You can eat cockroaches too but you won't."

Scarcity of food was the problem. The Pantheons did not eat or drink. They were cannibalistic, of a sort. They ate others of the same genetic material. Mostly, it meant the unstable generation, the so-called titans and they had hunted down most of them which had the side-effect of decreasing the danger to mortals. But it meant a lower food supply for their new additions. Fortunately, they only ever ate once a month like snakes.

Col. Nello started to type in the security codes on the jeep's monitor. Without looking Reborn in the eye, he said, "…Could be a still-born. The success rate is only three percent." The viral pathway often resulted in still-borns and monsters. Very rarely would a being like Reborn emerge, an ideal of perfection, the fruit of the Darwin System, the end of all ends. Only three percent of the hatchling surviving.

"Tsunayoshi will survive." Reborn said in the tone of voice that declared the sky was blue, gravity pulled down apples, and Col. Nello was an idiot.

And really, what was Col. Nello to say to that?

Travelling to the research base took a few hours and by then, more of those worthless walking corpses had again gathered around the metallic fence. Reborn had pulled on a pair of battered leather gloves and dispatched them all neatly by pulling their heads off one by one, the tendons ripping with the sound of wet jeans. He piled their corpses near the road for incineration later on. He was careful not to have the ladon eat any of the corpses. That would have poisoned the food.

And really, trash hanging around the place was inexcusable. Not when they could very well contaminate the hatchling.

Then he opened the fence gate and the jeep was admitted through, the ladon following obediently. It would be locked into a sealed biohazard room to be starved and imprisoned until Tsuna's feeding time. After which, Reborn had an appointment. What Dr. Irie liked to call dopamine imprinting moments with the hatchling.

0101010

Snakes left their young when newly-hatched. It was a documented fact that when born, they were already natural killers. But the Pantheon could ill afford such flippancy. The majority of the second harvest from the Heinlein hospital had died in the process of mutation, as a mutilated corpse or a walking zombie. Five were still locked up, unbalanced enough to pose a dangerous threat to the soldiers. They would be killed as they hadn't retained control after the change. Only one was still pending. Tsunayoshi.

And Reborn had been assigned as the parental custodian.

The moment Reborn had stepped into the lab, he'd heard the sound, the faint beating of Tsuna's heart, the whole of his cardiac cycle coordinated by faint electrical impulses even underneath the whirring and humming and thrumming of the incubating computers and machines. It was a steady current that came in waves that washed over Reborn's own frozen mind, an odd warm tranquility he'd come to associate with Tsuna.

At the detox unit, he complied with procedure even as it stripped him of his usual stink of smokes and old blood. Even with his rank in the Pantheon and changed biochemistry, infection was frighteningly high at this stage in the change and they were taking no chances.

The security cameras were turned off (per his request) and unwatched, he trekked through the monitors and empty tanks to the one housing Tsuna like a mechanical egg. Hanging puppet-like in a web of metallic tubes and wire patches, Tsuna's pulse slightly increased. Air bubbles rose from Tsuna's mouthpiece and his eyes rolled underneath his closed eyelids and his hands clawed for a bit at the cuffs. As if he could sense Reborn even under the fog of REM sleep.

Reborn tapped the glass and Tsuna's lips dipped down into a frown and Reborn felt a flash of amusement.

"Ciao-ssu again." And feeling a bit ridiculous but asking anyway, "And how have you been?" Reborn sat in one of the wheelie chairs and resisted the urge to pull out one of his smokes. "I have a nice breakfast for you when you wake up. Of course, you'll probably complain and whine and pull disgusted faces like Nello. But as your…" Reborn's voice didn't exactly stutter but was for a moment, a bit uncertain, "…your parental guardian, you'll eat what I tell you to eat. I know best about your nutritional needs, after all."

Tsuna's frown had deepened as if contrariwise, he thought very differently about Reborn's opinion.

Again, Reborn felt that amusement curling up his lips into a small smile as if the more Tsuna opposed him, the more he found it charming. "Hatchling, I know I'm right. And you'll thank me for it."

At that, Tsuna practically squirmed which rippled through his wires and tubes.

"Don't fuss," said Reborn. "Tell me, what will you manifest as? What form will you wake up with? Will you have black twitching feathers in your hair? Will you have black-tipped claws that'll rip through the enemies that stand before you? Will you shed the occasional inky green scales that are so often chipped off during hunting?"

Tsuna's lip curled a bit at the corners.

Reborn paused and then looked affronted. "I am _not_ going bald. The scales regrow and the old ones just fall off."

For thirty more minutes, Reborn sat there talking and occasionally tapping on the glass. He was mindful of his strength as the chemical egg could so easily crack and Tsuna would spill out, pink and premature. Reborn had used to think these scheduled moments as an annoyance. But it was hard to think of his hatchling that way for long. Dr. Irie might explain Reborn's growing attachment as the biological code demanding the weak young to be protected, translating to an instinctive weakness to soft and small things. And Reborn would even agree. The hatchling looked weak enough to warrant 24/7 attention. Until his first kill, Reborn couldn't leave his side too far.

But that wasn't all there was to it.

It was admiration too.

When Tsuna had driven miles on a stolen truck, when he had refused all food offered (low-grade titan body parts hastily mutated from prisoners), and when he had misappropriated that pencil and written frantically on the walls of his prison; they were symptoms of how much Tsuna was fighting the change. Of how much Tsuna was clinging to his humanity. A coward but he would fight like a cornered animal to keep what peace he had. That will to survive was something that Reborn respected in his hatchling.

It was admiration too and maybe even, a little fondness.

"—you would like it, as the stars are much brighter now."

The hiss of the automated quarantine doors interrupted Reborn and he leaned back in his chair, unperturbed by the disturbance. Only one person would intrude on Reborn without fear of having their arms ripped off. And it wasn't out of sheer stupidity, or a misplaced sense of bravery, but as a matter of course. Dr. Irie had to check up on Tsuna every hour.

"Please don't mind me," Dr. Irie said as he walked to the monitor connected to Tsuna and brought up the charts and graphs measuring Tsuna's progress.

Several minutes passed by as Dr. Irie typed commands into the central program.

It wasn't long before he started to fidget at the monitor. It didn't surprise Reborn as Dr. Irie's back was turned to him. Too easy to rip out his spine from this angle. And maybe, Dr. Irie could guess at what he was thinking because he turned around abruptly and said, "He really responds to you the most, did you notice?"

Reborn shrugged. Of course, his hatchling did.

"His nails stopped growing, which is normal for the change, but the physical mutations have yet to appear." Dr. Irie shook his head. "The viral nano-biochips are stubbornly inert. The radiation from the bomb scrambled them up. I've had to manufacture more of it to inject to him. It would have been easier if he'd just eaten what we'd given him. It doesn't usually take this long to mutate. Can you?" Dr. Irie visibly swallowed. "I mean, can you tell when 027 is going to be ready?"

The good doctor was rambling in his nervousness. Reborn would have been annoyed at the request but as it was, he was curious too.

He stood up from the chair and raised his claw-tipped fingers to the glass, three inches from Tsuna's sleeping face. Electricity crackled from his fingertips to travel through the glass, through the soporific chemicals, and to the five specific points on Tsuna's forehead. A network of neural activity in his hatchling's mind opened up before him, a secret sixth sense. And while it looked like a whizzing storm of shooting stars revolving around several central axes, Reborn could make an educated guess on the progress Tsunayoshi was making in integrating the viral biochips with himself. "One more week. He'll wake up by then."

Dr. Irie gave one last unhappy look at 027 then said his farewell to Reborn.

When he'd left, Reborn wondered on his expression. It had looked as if Dr. Irie was mourning one last time for the human that had been Tsunayoshi Sawada. Preserved as he was now, between adulthood and childhood, stuck forever in a body that will never fully develop, Tsuna might have even merited that look.

But that grief was unnecessary as Tsuna would become something even greater.

He would be reborn as a god.

0101010

The stars were brighter in the world.

After the decimation of approximately three quarters of the human population meant less light bulbs, less light pollution. Already, the Pantheon Military was establishing itself as one of the few remaining stable institutions in the world. As if they had been prepared.

The Calamity: S.(n). Event in 30XX overwhelming thousands and cutting down the majority of sectors deemed habitable by the world government. Martial law took effect shortly to contain the disaster and quarantine fences were built and patrolled by military units. The dead walk the streets of the abandoned sectors and monstrosities called titans run rampant. All are classified dangerous and are to be shot on sight. Cause of the Calamity: Unknown.

Several bombs had been set off to exterminate the plague of corpses. And when that had been done, the people burned the rest in an effort to quell the exploding numbers of the zombies and was only partly successful. The ashes floated in the air for weeks, a layer of smog that choked the districts and the local plantlife. Desertification rapidly spread like cancer. Farms died and schools closed and electricity was only barely maintained. Gated communities began cropping up, sometimes led by a cult leader and sometimes not. But it only fed the growing xenophobia and territorialism in the remaining survivors.

Amidst this political and social upheaval, the Pantheon remained immune and was beginning to symbolize the only remaining anchor in a world gone mad.

Already, wave after wave of civilians signed up with the Pantheon Military.

Yes, the stars were brighter. Because millions had died.

0101010

Fuuta, even though he'd been younger, was about the same height as Tsuna.

This fact was never more impressed upon Tsuna than when they stood face to face, in a waltz. As always, it was Fuuta who led Tsuna in a graceful sequence of steps that whirled them around the trees in careful view of the only footpath to be seen for miles around. If it had been Tsuna leading, they would have certainly ended up in a tangled heap of legs and painful elbows.

As it was, Fuuta gently pushed him into position by his hand on Tsuna's back and his other hand interlacing with Tsuna's fingers, pulling him along to the same beat and rhythm of the music. Grass rustled under their bare feet, bitterly cold in the morning fog that blotted out most of the distant trees and only silhouetted the nearer ones into eerie figures. It lent a blue tint to the air, a crispness of ice in a morgue.

On Fuuta's forehead, was a red hole streaking with blood, like a mark of a god.

Tsuna was crying into his shoulder.

Fuuta was smiling, his lips moving but all Tsuna could hear was a low buzzing, an insect-like hum that moved invasively into his ears and into his head and into his stomach.

Tsuna shook his head. No, no. No.

Where was he?

And who was Fuuta?

0101010

That was when Tsuna woke up inside the glass tank.

He was floating in a green sea. Wires and plastic tubes hooked into him held steady as he struggled through the haze of drugs and medication. Voices uttering scientific jargon and cool calculated faces and chemical aftertastes rose up in his memories. And a dark-eyed man who'd called him hatchling.

But it was as if he was outside of his body, watching it from above his head. He looked down on the brown hair floating like seaweed in the chemicals and his nose stuffed into a breathing mask. Needle bruises dotted his arms and the skin was wrinkled and reddened under the constant pressure of medical tape over the needles. He felt separated from his own body, watching from a distance. Even sound and sensation felt muffled as if from a long distance away.

And as if to punctuate the disparity, Tsuna's body was asleep while Tsuna himself was awake.

He felt loose, anchored by nothing but air and a vulnerable weightlessness filled him like a helium balloon so that it felt as if any moment, he would just float away. If someone would just cut him from these strings…

"—insane. To move him right now would kill him. You've said it yourself that infec—"

"Sho-chan, what Reborn wants, Reborn gets. Or he takes by force. Anyway, you've never really seen a Pantheon being born yet, have you? Trust me, it's better to move him now before this whole place comes down in ruins."

"B-but, I mean, how will we take notes? How will we observe and treat him if complications arise? I mean, why?"

"Because Reborn is a selfish bastard. He wants first kill to be private. It's a rite of passage and he doesn't want to share. Any complications will be up to him to solve. And if you really want information, you're always welcome to ask Reborn or the Archives."

"…Why does he want it be private? Has it always been this way?"

Into Tsuna's line of sight came two people, a red-headed doctor and a white-haired man. At this close range Tsuna's body visibly reacted, pulse increasing and blood going cold. The monitors beeped, indicating his distress. The white-haired man cooed, purple markings appearing on his face as he tapped on the glass tank. "Look at that. He can tell already when one of us is near him."

Tsuna watched this in apathy.

"Byakuran-sama, if you please."

The white-haired man's slitted pupils dilated to stare down at the doctor. "The birth of a god is a lesson in destruction. Even after first kill, a hatchling is still wild and uncontrollable. The parent god will ground him and redirect most of his force through fornication." Byakuran leered. "I can show you a demonstration if you like."

The doctor blushed and stammered out a no.

At the back of Tsuna's mind, he thought rather cynically that it was like being in high school all over again, when he'd been a bully target. The strong survived. And the strong ruled. And the strong could call themselves whatever the hell they wanted. Heroes, the in-crowd, and even gods. Names were important because they changed how you thought about things. Whether a daisy was a weed or a flower, or whether it was friendly teasing or outright bullying.

But what did Tsuna care anymore? It didn't matter, nothing did.

"Pity. It's just like popping a cherry," Byakuran said as he leaned back in towards Tsuna's body, tapping the glass again. "I guess Reborn likes to keep his mating rituals secret."

Dr. Irie choked, but moved to start packing up the machinery around Tsuna.

Tsuna slipped away again into another dream, this one about Fuuta giving him pomegranate seeds to eat and they were heavy seeds that settled deep in his stomach and they sprouted and grew and wriggled around his insides like parasites.

0101010

The second time Tsuna woke up, it was to the sound of klaxon alarms screaming and fists banging on the glass tank. A young soldier stared at him desperately, mouthing something muffled and banged on the glass again, the wires and chemicals rippling from the force.

Tsuna blinked sleepily and realized that he was back in his own body, in his own head again. He was starving, he noted dimly.

The soldier glared at him, frustration and panic coloring his face. He looked vaguely familiar but for the life of him, Tsuna couldn't remember the man.

He looked around, as much as the glass cover could let him. The glass tank was in a desert, dry cracked earth stretching for miles around. The sun beat down on the soldier whose nervous fingers skittered on the number panel screaming alarms on the glass tank. Then the soldier yelled in triumph and several valves on the tank hissed open and the green liquid started to drain out. Without the buoyancy of the green sea supporting him, Tsuna's shaky legs folded up and the IV needles ripped out, leaving pinprick bruises all over his arms and legs, and his head thunked against the glass.

Tsuna yawned, trying to wipe the sleep from his eyes. His hands missed several times, his motor control still shaky. He felt groggy, his emotions all dried up and leaving only torpor in its wake.

The soldier was still fiddling frantically with the number panel.

That was when Tsuna heard the thunder. The thunder that rumbled, the thunder that roared, the thunder that was like a hammer blow crashing the silence of the desert. The soldier stumbled, clutching at the panel. Then he stared straight at Tsuna, unblinking. He leaned forward and placed his palm on the glass, the place where Tsuna's own hand had stopped him from hitting his head again.

Behind him rose a fleshy tower of a monster.

Tsuna watched it in horror as it opened its mouth, its rotating teeth gnashing in agitation and strings of saliva dripping down.

The soldier tapped on the glass once. A farewell. Then the man turned about and charged at the monster, gun swinging in battle. Like a damned martyr. Faintly, Tsuna could hear his tinny screaming and gunshots peppering at the monster. It only enraged the monster further as the bullets caused nothing but flesh wounds.

The idiot was going to kill himself.

Too many had died so that Tsuna could live.

Tsuna slammed his trembling fists against the glass. His mouth opened and promptly he puked out chemicals. He coughed, his throat burning and raw, too raw to even mutter a warning let alone scream at the soldier to stop.

The soldier was good but not that good. He weaved around the outcroppings of rocks, taking aim at the mouth of the monster to damage more internal organs that way. But the monster slithered around the bullets in frightening speed despite its bulk. It cried out in hunger, tail crashing into the ground and rock debris flew and it was inevitable that the soldier, as fast as he was, was knocked out cold.

He pounded against the glass, arms aching but growing in speed and strength. Harder, he had to punch harder, he had to be stronger. The pain and hunger had retreated to a dull hum and panic had surged upward and adrenaline was surging through his veins. The glass cracked, a few hairlines in the glass shell.

The monster circled the prone body of the soldier like a vulture, testing him if he would attack again.

The white maggoty scars lengthened across his arms and odd wriggling things in his stomach and in his head squirmed like intravenous worms. One last swing and the glass shattered, shards flying apart.

The monster coiled back, as if preparing to strike.

Too far, Tsuna was too goddamned far. He ran still, feeling oddly light and dizzy in his head. His legs stumbled beneath him, too weak from disuse and he cried out as he hit dirt, his face grinding against the ground. His pulse raced, sweat dripping down him. The man was going to die.

The man would die a fucking pointless death.

Air pressure increased, a heavy blanket suffocating those who were in the vicinity. The monster screeched, frightened in recognizing the warning signs. It was cut short as a blur slammed into it, sending it tumbling meters away. It moaned in fear and pain even as it prepared to attack for its food.

Tsuna stood in front of the soldier, back straight, breath ragged and racing. He stared at his hands, covered in the creature's torn flesh.

Its tail pounded against the ground and the ground split, debris flying in the air and the creature's tail, like lightning, like a whip, batted the rocks towards them. Tsuna hauled the soldier to his shoulder like he weighed nothing and odd instincts fired in succession in his brain to maneuver him safely in the hail of boulders. At the corner of his eye, the monster was slithering to his back, to gain an advantage.

He breathed, one two three even as the boulders crashed around them. They called it a balancing breath, the inhalation and exhalation of balancing between two roads, two hells. The man's heart beat against his shoulder, a dull systolic and diastolic staccato. Time slowed and the man's heartbeat followed in reaction, beat stretched into one long pulse. The monster was siddling sideways, a slow torturous crawl in that bogged down timeframe.

In a blink of an eye, Tsuna had stomped its head into the ground, skull collapsing under the pressure.

As the blood and flesh rained around them, Tsuna's white scars diffused back into mocha skin and time resumed its normal pace. But the jittery sensation hadn't left. And the air pressure, instead of dispersing, propagated more and more and had focused its density on Tsuna's head and it felt as if he would explode. He stared at the bloated corpse of the monster and the hunger came back with vengeance, a growing black hole in his stomach.

Tsuna leant down and gorged on dead flesh, trying to fill the emptiness.

A few minutes later, he vomited in horror. But the hunger wouldn't leave and now he was staring in confusion at the soldier next to him. At the man's broad shoulders and brawny arms. Tsuna licked his mouth and the hunger and terror and shock only whirled around him in a fog. He crawled towards the man, straddled him, and lapped at the man's neck. The man didn't move, concussed out of his mind. Tsuna pawed at the soldier, frustrated. He whined.

"Hey, you. Let me kill you and shut you up."

Tsuna stiffened and crouched low over the soldier in protection. He scanned his surroundings, senses overloading him with information. Nothing. There was nobody here at all.

A hand grabbed his hair and hauled him backwards and Tsuna scrabbled at the soldier, wanting him close. But another hand ripped the human away from him and he was turned around to face the speaker. His hand shot forward, to break this interloper's skull in just as he had with the monster. Cold metal bit into Tsuna's wrist, halting his arm's considerable speed. And before Tsuna could even use his other hand, it too was handcuffed and both his arms were dragged upwards, hoisting Tsuna to his tippy-toes.

The speaker held his hand out and metallic chains had come out of the palm to a point above Tsuna's head where a hovering pulley directed the chain down to the handcuffs encircling Tsuna's wrists held high in the air.

He had clear grey eyes—so unlike the dark-eyed man who called him hatchling—and his mouth was curled up in pleasure. This time, Tsuna felt it, the DNA resonating to DNA. Another one. Like him. Older. More mature. Power so intense that it rolled off him in heatwaves. He was a furnace. The god spoke again, leaning into his face, "I remember you. You used to study at my school. What was it again? Dame-Tsuna, that was it." The name pierced through the fog, calling up bits of memories of school and life from before. He blinked, feeling déjà vu at the sight of the god's face.

The grey-eyed god reeled the chains in a bit more, Tsuna straining his legs like a ballerina to relieve the pain from his arms.

"It's a pity you killed the titan before I could. Now I can't even eat it." The god walked closer and now Tsuna could make out three black horns on his head, like a crown. "I wondered what all the racket was."

"…H-Hibari-sempai?"

Hibari smiled, "Bingo."


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: Reborn is not mine. Since I'm unable to edit the story's ratings, I'll just say upfront that this story has turned into an M-rated one.

0101010

Viral NanoBio-chips: (P.) n. A.k.a. viral bio-chips. Converges to consume and alter strings of DNA of any organism. A bio-engineer's dream, the evolutionary tool allowing genetic enhancements via rapid mutation. Manufactured inside living humans which results in zombies, titans, and very rarely, a Pantheon god. Was once called the God Complex.

Zombies: (P.) n. A still-born of the virus, theoretical dead-ends of the evolutionary tree. Spreads like rats. Shares the virus' hunger for DNA but nothing else. The nanobio-chips have never manifested in them.

0101010

"You have the fledgling's fever," Hibari commented. "Not bad yet but in ten minutes or so, the bio-chips will start cannibalizing your own cells."

Tsuna whimpered as the heat Hibari was emitting was burning him up faster, choking what little breathe he could inhale. The world around him was beginning to spin gently and the nauseating emptiness was leeching the rest of his strength slowly but surely, his legs teetering on his tiptoes like an exhausted tightrope-walker. "The soldier…is he okay?"

Hibari wandered over to the man and kicked him. The man didn't stir. "Dead."

Tears falling fast and blurring his vision, Tsuna wept for the bravery the man.

For his wasted life.

Hibari had moved on to prodding the monster with his foot. "Tch. Dead too. Good job, though."

For a few seconds, Tsuna was quiet, trying to gulp air back in past the blockade of grief in his throat, shifting from one strained upturned foot to the other as pinpricks of pain jabbed his muscles. Then because Hibari still hadn't stopped kicking at the monster and because Tsuna was quietly losing his grip on the chains, he asked "Sempai…what did you mean? By fever?"

Hibari stopped kicking the monster and gave him another pleased smile. "It's been a long time since someone called me sempai." Then he tapped his chin and added, "But I like Hibari-san better."

Promptly, Tsuna said, "Hibari-san." The handcuffs clinked as Tsuna's fingers clawed at them to maintain his balance.

Hibari gave him a strange look. "…Hey. Can you sing the Namimori School Anthem?"

Sweat was dripping down Tsuna's face in buckets and the ground was slowly looking miles and miles below him in a hallucinatory vertigo and the soldier was dead, the hero was in his grave, and it was all stupid Tsuna's fault. For the moment, the non-sequitor threw him off and Tsuna slipped, the chains clanking and his arms suddenly bearing his entire body weight. Tsuna quickly scrambled up to his toes and could only ask "W-what?"

"Sing it."

Tsuna made a little crying sound, a sob. He was so hungry, so hungry that the feeling was crawling up his chest, his hands, and his head like red ants under his skin until he realized that he was mixing the pain of hunger with the feeling of muscle cramps. He didn't want to sing, not when it felt as if his throat was drying up in the desert and that his head was drowning in muck and blood.

Hibari pursed his lips then sighed. "Fine. I'll make a deal with you. Sing the whole Namimori Anthem while standing just like that. If you do that, I'll help you through the fever. But in exchange, I get some of the ladon."

It was an exorbitant request but at this point, Tsuna would have promised anything to stop the migraine and the fever and the hunger and his racing pulse. It was overwhelming Tsuna and he had the ominous feeling that if he didn't stop this fever within its tracks, he would collapse again into shock. Permanently, this time.

Biting his lip, the fresh burst of pain woke him from the fog for just a little bit more.

He swallowed the thick sludge of saliva that had built up and opened his mouth to sing. "The green that trails Namimori…"

For a few minutes, Hibari watched Tsuna croak out the Anthem in his chains. Tsuna's voice was raspy, a little off-tone in some parts and an uncontrollable tremor had shaken his limbs and his voice. Twice, he'd nearly forgotten a line and had lapsed into silence until Hibari prompted him with a word. Tears of exhaustion were slipping from his blood-shot eyes and a reddish tint of the fever was branded across his cheeks. By the last words of "Let's walk together, Namimori Middle School." Tsuna was practically gasping.

Then Hibari bent down next to the monster he called ladon and tore a large bite from the pale flesh.

He stood up, chewing.

Then he grabbed Tsuna's hair, cradling his head and kissed him open-mouthed. Tsuna gagged but Hibari's tongue was pushing the meat forward and his fingers were digging into Tsuna's jaw to keep his mouth open.

Tsuna swallowed, throat working against his gag reflex, the uncooked meat and Hibari's saliva going down with a strange sweetness.

Hibari ended the kiss with a bite at Tsuna's lips.

"There. You'll last another hour before we get back to my headquarters." Hibari released the slack on the chains and Tsuna slumped to the ground in a daze. The older god bent down again and ripped a sizable thick flank from the ladon. It was twice his size but Hibari merely carried it with one arm and a smirk directed at Tsuna. He walked a few paces away from Tsuna where he'd parked a motorcycle in the distance. He wrapped up the meat in leather and dumped it into the passenger sidecar.

For Tsuna, the air pressure had decreased, returning to an almost normal level. The hunger had its edge blunted off and was now only a dim murmur. But the fever hadn't stopped. He was rubbing his arms and legs, soothing the twitching muscles but it felt scalding to the touch. Worse, his skin now felt hypersensitive to the granules of sand that was stirred up by the wisps of wind. It rubbed him raw like sandpaper.

Then Hibari picked him up and slung him over the god's shoulder. "I took enough meat for us both. Any more will just rot. Now, let's go."

Staring down Hibari's back, Tsuna clutched the god's white shirt. He mumbled.

"What?"

"…Thank you, Hibari-san."

Hibari smirked again then climbed onto the motorcycle. Candidly he said, "A deal is a deal." Then he slid Tsuna to the front of the seat so he could use both arms to bracket Tsuna to reach the handlebars and keep the fledgling from falling off. But before he could start the engine, Tsuna mumbled again into his neck.

Feeling slightly annoyed, Hibari replied, "You'll owe me more for this."

But he did as Tsuna asked and went back to the soldier to bury him.

0101010

This was a sequence of events occurring on that day, guaranteeing Reborn's absence and ensuring Hibari's involvement.

Without even one of them, there were a million little ways for that day to end in a catastrophe; alternative futures where Hibari and Reborn clashed and killed each other, where Tsuna died in a desert alone, where Lancia himself killed the feverish Tsuna in an act of self-defense, where Reborn slaughtered every soldier under his command. A million futures and only one ended right—or at least with the minimum amount of casualties.

One, on that day, Naito was assigned to the Pantheon facility as a scavenger scout for the electrical department. And that in exhaustion and depression, Naito had swiped a bundle of wires that included one particular wire with a tiny sliver of a cut in its rubber casing and had handed it to his manager without inspecting it much.

Two, that the engineers were overhauling the wiring of the security system of the Pantheon prison for three days in a row without much sleep. And that one of them had picked up that wire with the cut and inserted it into the framework of wires and closed the metallic lid and had gone off to nap in the cafeteria. So that when one of the engineers did a test-run, the wire with the cut immediately short-circuited the whole system, melting bits of other wires and disrupting the entire power grid monitoring the Pantheon facility.

Three, that the five mentally unbalanced mutations from the Heinlein Hospital were on lock down but had been starved by the negligence of one of Dr. Irie's harassed interns, whose only mistake had been misfiling the papers for the mutations. They were starved for a whole week and had already mutated far enough to become full-fledged titans.

Four, that Reborn had been starving himself too, in preparation of the feast he would share with his hatchling, Tsuna's first feeding. Which greatly crippled his own energy stores.

Five, that when the security system failed because of the cut wire, the five imprisoned experiments watched their cell doors sliding opening. And found food scurrying around in army green uniforms.

Six, that Pvt. Lancia woke up from a nightmare starring Tsuna held down being raped in a scientific experiment. He'd simply snapped and stolen the key access card for the army truck containing Tsuna's glass tank and stolen it to drive beyond the territories of the Pantheon, beyond even the known quarantine boundary, into Hibari's lands.

Seven, that Reborn would be so busy containing the five escaped titans, he would miss his daily dopamine imprinting moments with his hatchling, missing the thief in his crime by only an hour. After he'd systematically cut down all five, he would head back to his own rooms and leave the cleaning up to Dr. Irie and Byakuran. He would fall asleep on the floor of his own room in exhaustion, blood and pieces of flesh still stuck to his uniform.

Eight, that when Reborn went to see Tsuna three hours after, he would only find an empty incubating port, the glass egg missing. In a fit of rage, he would then release the ladon and order it to hunt down his hatchling by smell and to devour the thief in strips and pieces. When Reborn finished imprinting the command on the ladon, he would then collapse again, having exhausted the last of his reserves on that imprinting. Only a few seconds later, Byakuran would most certainly have stabbed him in the back if Coll. Nello and Dr. Irie hadn't found Reborn first.

Nine, that Hibari would be bored and hungry and roaming around on his motorcycle on that particular hour when Pvt. Lancia was attempting to open Tsuna's tank.

And lastly, that it would be Sawada Tsunayoshi, a former student in Namimori School.

All 10 were merely coincidences. But maybe that was all it took.

0101010

"Stop crying or I'll eat you alive."

Tsuna just sniffled, trying to physically bury his head in Hibari's shoulder. The wet patch of tears and snot had gotten bigger on Hibari's shirt. Normally, he'd have beaten the crap out of Tsuna already just for being a soppy little creature chewing grass. But now, he just revved the motorcycle faster and ignored the warm weight of Tsuna's head. There was a certain pleasure in having something small and soft depending on him.

Maybe even devoted.

No, Hibari did not mind the wet patch.

He did mind the silence though. "Are you dead yet?"

Tsuna shook his head but otherwise remained stubbornly quiet in crying.

Hibari frowned.

Already, they had made some progress into the empty city-district of Namimori. Here and there, a stray zombie lurched with a broom in hand.

Hibari tolerated their crowding his city.

At first, he had exterminated them for hanging around. But more and more showed up and they never seemed to learn. Worse, they did humdrum things repetitiously. One had opened and closed the post office door over and over again. Another one had turned the pages from a yellow book, back and forth. There had even been one who swept leaves around with no apparent notion of what to do with the leaves afterwards. Even dead and chemically altered, the body remembered too well its habits and routine.

Then one day, playing around with one of them, he ordered it to gather all the books in the city and to dump it in front of the school.

He had felt a brief electrical static on the skin where his horns protruded.

The zombie had stopped its tedious kicking of a ball and had walked off. The other three zombies within hearing distance had also stopped rolling their dull shopping carts and had lumbered off. Bored, Hibari had gone back to hunt for some amusement. When he'd returned to his school, there were piles and piles of books in front of the gates.

Now, though Hibari paid his dead servants no mind as he rode the motorcycle nearer the gated Namimori High.

The school was a convenient safehouse. There was a kitchen with a room-sized freezer, a library, working bathrooms, a few trees to nap against, and a disciplinarian office with a couch to sleep on. There was even a fully-stocked nurse's office and a back-up generator (he was studying to prolong shelf-life) and the principal's office where he'd found the keys to every door in the school. The roof was an even nicer spot to sleep in and was a vantage point overlooking most of the city.

But he would have to haul in a whole bed, Hibari mused. Something nice and expensive.

Later.

He needed to fulfill his end of the bargain. He turned off the motorcycle as the school gates behind him closed automatically. He checked Tsuna's temperature and deemed it safe for a few more minutes. He dragged Tsuna to the steps to the main doors of the school building. He laid the fledgling against the wall in the shade but when he moved away, Tsuna clutched at his arm in panic. Hibari ran his fingers through Tsuna's hair and Tsuna blinked at him, eyes milky with fever.

"I need to put my bike away."

Tsuna let go reluctantly, curling up in on himself against the wall.

Hibari frowned again.

He went back to the bike, picked the meat up, and dropped it off near Tsuna who avoided looking at it. Then he rolled the motorcycle into the shop classroom where he kept most of his tools and oil containers for the bike. He ignored the mess of chairs and tables in the classroom and just propped the motorcycle beside the teacher's desk.

Heading back, he carried Tsuna to the disciplinarian's office. Then he had to go and get the meat, which was a bit troublesome already as flies were already swarming around it. He swiped at them, killing the whole swarm and dropping each fly to the ground.

Still, the sight of Tsuna staring up at him in sweat-slicked hospital pajamas on his leather couch was rewarding enough as he entered the office.

Hibari threw the meat on the low table, near enough for him to reach. He loosened the black necktie while he said, "I'm not going to fuck you. Not yet. Not like this."

Tsuna furrowed his eyebrows but his fever was increasing again, the fog thicker than before, now completely blotting out memory and sadness and leaving this irrational boiling heat in his skin. He squirmed miserably under the assault of the rough cotton of his pajamas.

"But I will enjoy this," Hibari said as he casually ripped Tsuna's pajamas into tatters

Tsuna's breath hitched as cold air hit his naked skin.

Hibari snagged Tsuna's ankles and lifted the fledgling (who squeaked) off a bit from the couch he could sit down. Then he adjusted Tsuna on his lap, facing him with the fledgling's legs comfortably wrapped around his hips. He grunted as Tsuna shook in his arms, inadvertently grinding down. "Stop that."

"…_hungry," _it was a low delirious whisper against Hibari's chin that went straight to his cock.

Tsuna's eyes had slid down half-mast, a devout disciple praying for mercy from Hibari.

He cupped Tsuna's face even as Tsuna nuzzled into his hand.

Hibari reached out with his other hand and cut a piece from the flank with his claws. He chewed the strip of meat, his saliva killing bacteria and germs on it. He opened Tsuna's mouth again and sealed their lips together. Just as he was passing the masticated meat, Tsuna blinked awake then bit him and shoved him away.

Attempted to, anyway.

If Hibari hadn't prepared himself for that little rebellion, if he hadn't gripped Tsuna's waist with vice-like strength, Tsuna would have tumbled headfirst into the table and broken his neck. As it was, his lip was bleeding and Tsuna was spitting out perfectly good food in horror on to his couch.

And crying again.

Blubbering about how he wasn't a cannibal, he wasn't one of those grey corpses, he wasn't a monster, he wasn't a monster, wasn'tWASN'T—

Hibari kissed him again, halting the stream of words. His hands rubbed comforting circles on Tsuna's quavering hips. The fledgling had grasped onto his biceps and was squeezing tight, nails digging in. Then Hibari started to hum, a deep vibrating sound from his chest. Tsuna rocked against him, desperately hard and aching. Hibari broke free from the kiss to lick at Tsuna's ear and murmur to the fledgling. "You need to eat. Why won't you eat?"

Tsuna shook his head and repeated his earlier mantra, "—not a monster, not a monster, not a—"

Hibari laughed huskily at the fledgling. "Dame-Tsuna. Haven't you ever heard of Spinoza? A creature follows its inherent nature as intended. A lion hunts and kills because it is in his nature. A carnivore eats animals because that is how he lives and nobody begrudges him his feeding habits. You are not a monster for having to eat flesh; not when it is in our nature."

"…not a monster?"

"No. Now, eat." For the next hour, Hibari fed Tsuna by mouth, his cock rigidly pressing against the soft swell of Tsuna's butt.

Twice, Tsuna rutted against him as lust overwhelmed his fledgling and he came on Hibari's abdomen. Hibari wiped it away and fed Tsuna more strips of meat, and eating some himself. Tsuna occasionally surged forward on his lap to eat the meat directly from his hands, lapping at his fingers. Impatience was something he expected from the fledgling.

Tsuna's fever was infecting him too but its effects were different for him. His saliva increased, responding to the fledgling's need for a parent's fully integrated viral bio-chips with his own DNA. The titan meat only provided raw bio-chips. That potent mix of integrated DNA with processed viral bio-chips in his bodily fluid would incite Tsuna's own cells to imitate the absorption process. It was, technically possible for Tsuna to absorb the raw bio-chips without any help. But at this stage of the fever, that was impossible. Tsuna needed Hibari's saliva with the meat.

Another side-effect, if Hibari had bothered to notice, was their synchronized neurological activity. Dopamine flooded their synapses to foster any bond between them, even if it was only to mirror each other. So that Hibari could faintly feel Tsuna's own desperate hunger and Tsuna could subconsciously borrow some of Hibari's own strength in his time of need.

After Tsuna had exhausted himself on a third orgasm and stuffed himself full, Hibari let the fledgling cuddle his jacket as he finished the rest of the meat and then jacked off, watching the sleepy Tsuna. Then he let the fledgling sleep on his lap as he dropped off to a light doze.

0101010

Hibari's eyes snapped open. He scanned his office then glanced down.

Tsuna was snoring on his thigh and had cut off the circulation in his leg. Hibari felt Tsuna's forehead with the palm of his hand. No fever. If Hibari had been that kind of man, he would have sighed. As it was, Hibari lifted the sleeping fledgling into his arms bridal-style. They both stank of sweat and lust and bloody meat. They needed to shower.

He added it to his mental list of duties, procuring both a bed and a tub and some clothes.

The school's common showers would have to do for now.

0101010

Tsuna woke up to the patter of water on his shoulders. He yawned and was surprised to find he was pretty well-rested and that he had slept without nightmares for once. A leanly muscled arm was curled up around his belly and another one was rubbing conditioner into his hair. Tsuna tilted his up and back to meet Hibari's grey eyes peering down at him. "Good morning, Dame-Tsuna."

A shy smile bloomed on Tsuna's face. "Morning, Hibari-san."

"Face down and close your eyes."

Tsuna did as he was asked and Hibari continued what he'd been doing. Hibari's pianist fingers carded through his brown hair, a sharp scent of oranges and cream filling Tsuna's nose. Then Hibari grabbed a plastic bucket filled with water and poured it over Tsuna, the suds swirling on the tiles to the open grating a few inches away.

"…Why did you pick me up, Hibari-san?"

"Would you like me to kick you out again?" asked Hibari, a bit amused. He picked up a washcloth, squeezed bath gel onto it, and started scouring the grime of chemicals and dust off Tsuna.

"No! I just, I mean," said Tsuna as he stared at his scabbed knees. "It's just, you seem different. From before." He added lamely. _I remember you being a violent over-controlling prefect, for one thing. _But Tsuna would have died of shame before he said that. Hibari who had controlled the fever, who had stopped the nightmares, who had ended the hunger.

Tsuna bowed his head and blushed, fiercely hoping his bangs would hide it.

Hibari grabbed Tsuna's jaw and tilted his face up, wanting to see his expression. "I was bored." Hibari had been bored of the silence, bored of the grey monotony of the walking corpses. Bored enough that he'd even gone crazy and went out and killed a lot of things. Then one day like a stroke of luck, like a fortuitous star, he found darling dame-Tsuna on his territories. And Hibari considered Tsuna his. Like the Namimori city, like the lands contained by the quarantine line, they were his possessions. Therefore, it was his duty and responsibility to take care of them. What he owned, what he considered his, were precious and were to be honored and held up to the highest standards.

It meant he was both owner and ruler.

"Oh." Tsuna didn't seem to understand and had dropped his eyes in disappointment. Then he yelped.

"Ah, Hibari-san, I can wash down there, um, but thank you very much."

0101010

The older god handed him a folded Namimori uniform and Tsuna gratefully took it. As he pulled out the black uniform pants, a black lacy panty fell out. A bit strangled for words, Tsuna could only say "Um."

"What's wrong?" Hibari was pulling black boxers on as he looked at the furiously red Tsuna. "Don't tell me you forgot how to put on clothes."

Tsuna couldn't very well scream out that it was a pair of panties. He also couldn't just put the panties on, like it was normal. But maybe, Hibari really didn't have many clothes in this place and had just taken whatever he'd found? And really, it smelled and looked clean. But it was a tiny pair of black lacy panties with a little silver bow on top. Worse, it looked as if it _would_ fit him.

"The ribbon goes on the back." Hibari said as he donned his black slacks already. He stopped as Tsuna was still holding the panties awkwardly in his hand. "I'm giving you two minutes to put on your clothes before I force you to go around naked."

Well, that decided it. Tsuna quickly pulled the panties up and jumped into his clothes as fast as possible lest he annoy Hibari. And anyway, it wasn't as if anyone was going to see him wearing panties. It was underneath his pants after all. So it was okay. For the moment.

Hibari's lip quirked up.

Just as Tsuna was buttoning his shirt, Hibari said, "You should get rid of those."

Without another second of delay, Hibari broke the steel biofeedback handcuffs riveted to Tsuna's wrist from his stay at the Pantheon.

Tsuna hissed but the puncture holes on his skin were closing up already, the skin re-knitting itself with unnatural speed.

"They don't suit you." Hibari crumpled the handcuffs in his hand like it was made of paper. The Pantheon logo on it had warped into the folds of metal. "I suspect you have some questions. I'll ask that you hold them off for the moment as I intend for Kusakabe to answer them."

"Who's Kusakabe?" asked Tsuna as he slipped on flip-flops.

Hibari swiftly tied a black necktie around himself as he replied, "The Foundation's Vice Chairman." He paused to look at Tsuna's feet.

Tsuna, likewise, looked down to his feet. His toes wriggled. They looked clean enough. He wondered what Hibari was thinking then chastised himself when he could just ask. "The Foundation? And why are you staring at my feet?"

Hibari ignored the question and said, "Mm. Come. I have chores for you to do." Hibari fixed Tsuna's clumsy attempts at the necktie. "If you stay, you work."

0101010

Tsuna's first chore was to collect the books from outside the gates on the street. He was to bring in all the books and into the library and to organize them in alphabetical order. And he would have to list all the books into an organized index card catalog. It was going to take him forever.

And there were other chores too, like watering the plants in the school yard. Sweeping the halls of the school. Cleaning the bathrooms. Organizing and listing the contents of the kitchen pantry although Tsuna did wonder who the food was for. Hibari told him that he didn't expect it all to be done this day or even tomorrow. As long as he was working productively, Hibari wouldn't bite him to death. After the first day, Tsuna had barely even dented the piles of books on the street.

The sun was setting and the city was depressingly empty from street corner to street corner. Tsuna stretched the kinks out of his back and yawned. He'd wondered why there were even books outside but he didn't ask any troubling questions from Hibari and was content enough to distract himself with mind-numbing work. He didn't want to leave the books outside to the mercies of the weather and humidity but there were just too many books.

Tsuna was tired.

He glanced at a spot under the shade of a knotty oak tree. A nap would be okay, wouldn't it?

After what felt like an interminable stretch of time in darkness and ruin, this day was his first peaceful one. Before he knew it, Tsuna was leaning against the tree and his eyelids shutting down and he was gone in sleep.

A few minutes later, Hibari walked out of the school doors to pick him up. He didn't seem surprised that Tsuna had fallen asleep as if he'd been routinely checking on Tsuna through the window. He'd already dragged in a bed and a bathtub while the fledgling was busy. And a few other things.

0101010

When Tsuna woke up on the bed, it was still dark outside. A starless sky greeted him as harsh winds howled outside. His face was squished into Hibari's pectorals which he could faintly see through the uniform and his arms had snaked around the older god's solid abs. It was a bit too hot but Tsuna didn't mind. It was comforting, the heat.

What was odd was something circling his neck. He fingered it, wondering what it was. It felt like leather. With a tag on.

"A collar is better, hmm?"

Tsuna's eyes snapped up and met Hibari's drowsy face. He felt another terrific blush creeping up his neck. "Um."

"Is it too tight?"

"No, um. What does the dogta—I mean the tag say?"

"Just the Namimori School address." Hibari gave him a neutral expression. "In case you get lost. Now sleep. It's late."

Tsuna did just that, somehow anchored by the collar, no longer adrift in an empty universe.


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: Characters not mine.

Warning: Explicit mentions of (near)rape.

AN: Was a bit late because my beta was MIA.

0101010

Before the masses of soldiers, Byakuran stood in a white uniform, pristinely clean and obsessively starched.

His purple eyes arced into happy slits and the purple markings on his face surfaced. He raised the megaphone to his mouth and announced, "Your families are dead. Your friends are dead. Your government is dead. Even your god is dead."

Byakuran laughed. "Zombies infest our world. Already they spread like rats and they show no mercy in slaughtering humans. You will die along with the others, eaten like pigs in a feast." He licked his lips, his unnaturally long tongue scaling the shape of his mouth as if to savor their taste. "What will you do to survive? What are you willing to sacrifice to win this game? What will you pay?"

Then Byakuran flourished his white wings behind him, his arms outstretched to welcome the soldiers. "My friends! I give you the opportunity for power." He held up the vial of green liquid and was met with curious gazes. "—but at a price."

"You will lose all memories, which may even seem a blessing after the Calamity." The soldiers murmured. Byakuran laughed, contemptuously asking, "What will you choose? Will you die in the streets like trash, clutching what sentimental and inconsequential memories you have? Or will you become like us, as gods, free of all earthly chains? We _can_ remake you as gods."

Thunderous applause filled the audience chamber as several scientists came forward to take down names into files and into the lineup schedule of injections.

And a security camera tracked the events as Byakuran smiled at it and waved.

At the other end of the security camera's wires was Dr. Irie's pale face. He stood up. Reborn-san needed to be told that Byakuran was breaking the agreement.

Control of food belonged to the strong, the biological code would say. To Reborn, the oldest and the strongest.

But, for Byakuran, sick of eating the dead still-borns, reason of higher beings said that there was a way to gain more food, to get stronger. The answer was so simple: infect more humans to produce a larger stock of titans. This was just a more complicated way of farming, convincing all these soldiers to willingly offer themselves to be mutated. Seventy percent would end up as walking corpses. Twenty-seven as titans. And only three would end up as actual gods. But those small percent, Byakuran would strangle at their birth.

No use in having competitors in the Darwin System.

Byakuran smiled from ear to ear, teeth sharp and ready.

Already, tank eggs were being wheeled in to the fascination of the soldiers and the blank faces of the scientists. Already, metallic pipes were being plugged in and monitors lighting up with the Pantheon logo. Already, the first batch of patients was being ushered inside the tanks like children, like seeds planted for harvest.

0101010

When Dr. Irie had arrived at the healing tanks, he found Reborn's empty. When he attempted to call Reborn, he heard the ringing and found the cell on the floor. He called Col. Nello who could not provide any answer.

Reborn was gone.

0101010

The smell of death lay heavy over the scene, like a blanket.

In this heat, the ladon's body had putrefied into a bloated mess. Its skeletal ribs were exposed, where deep claw gouges had raked out the flank muscles. Maggots were already crawling all over its folds of flesh as flies hovered over them with an insect-like humming. At this stage with the maggots fully grown, the ladon would have died around eight to twenty hours before.

Those five titans had met a sorry end in his needle-like teeth. If they had not interfered, if they had not escaped, if they had not _fucking_ screwed up everything…

Reborn relaxed his claws, flicking off the beads of blood that had formed on his palms.

The ground was hard-packed cracked earth, almost like cement. There were no tracks to be found. But there was the grave of the original thief. Reborn wasn't surprised at his death. The ladon at least had done something useful. But that the thief would be given a proper burial was a surprise.

After he'd vented a little more on the soldier's corpse and even the ladon's useless body, Reborn took out a cigarette and lighted it to smoke and think. He could barely taste it, his biochemistry having altered even that pleasure.

But the smell was reassuring and the habit even more so.

He had been…stupid, Reborn admitted. He had not been prepared enough for that disaster. He had let the glow of his hatchling's coming birth cloud his judgment. He flicked the ashes off. And as a result of his failure, Tsunayoshi had been taken.

His hatchling had killed the ladon, he was sure. The glass tank's cover had been smashed through from the inside with shards littering in a radius outside it. Then the ladon had deep discolorations in its flesh, indicating impact from a small point of origin, possibly Tsuna's fists or feet. Then there were tiny teeth marks on the ladon. Tsuna had tried to feed himself. Reborn chuckled briefly, finding the image of Tsuna crawling on the ground endearing. But he had vomited it out into the stinking mess next to the ladon's corpse. Reborn could smell the acidic make-up of the bile still lingering in that spot.

No, Tsuna had not been able to feed himself. Someone else had fed him.

And he could guess who it was.

The ladon had been expertly sliced off, only enough for two. For his hatchling and this second thief.

There was only one fool in this district who could have taken the meat. That rogue titan, that pretender to godhood, the only one who had retained control. Who considered this district his, ergo everything on it was also his. And the hatchling was supposed to inspire protectiveness in its guardians to ensure its complete growth and maturation.

Reborn had never bothered with him before because they ruled two different worlds.

Now, he needed to find one of Hibari's minions and beat Hibari's whereabouts out of them.

0101010

Darwin System: Mutation process. Path of virus ends in three ways: the still-born (walking corpse); the titan (unstable abominations); and the Pantheon (ideals of perfection). The fledgling fever, competition for food, and hostile circumstances mowed down the titans and the Pantheon with only the strongest surviving. Dopamine imprinting moments will strengthen and ground neophyte, similar to parental roles and duties. Survival without such bonds has been known to happen.

Reborn: The oldest of the old, the first Pantheon. Insignia: the lightning.

0101010

Tsuna woke up, entangled in white sheets and uncomfortably hot. The office was empty and the venetian blinds were partially closed on the windows, throwing striped shadows on the floor.

He sat up, kicking off the sheets.

Where was Hibari-san? And where were his pants?

Then he spotted the note on the low table. Panic seized him for a second as thoughts of Hibari abandoning him filled his head with dizzying speed. But the steady weight of the collar anchored him, reassured him that Hibari would come back. A collar meant ownership, meant a small shred of commitment.

Tsuna walked over to read the note.

_Stay inside the office._

_Do not go outside._

_-Hibari._

Huh. Tsuna shivered. Then he heard the dull roar of motorcycles and screaming and laughing. And gunshots. He crept to the windows and peeked outside.

Motorcycles and modified trucks with slits for guns were arriving by the dozen. They would shoot down occasional walking corpses and whatever caught their eye in the sky. In leather and studs and tattoos and piercings, even their clothes screamed out the word marauder with noticeable stitches and zippers and rips all over. Marauders on bikes, smoking like the world had ended and only this time now was precious. All wearing the same red armbands with words scrawled on them.

Tsuna squinted.

The words read _The Foundation._

Tsuna watched them wheel into the schoolyard, singing like drunken sailors. He watched them carefully avoid the books and set up temporary camp on the yard (which was an idea, cover up the books with a tarp tent). He watched them begin to group to talk and to trade weapons from bent golf clubs to heavy guns and wrapped packages with red crosses on them and sometimes the Pantheon logo crudely painted on.

Then he watched one of them walk solemnly to the wall of the school building to nail in five tattered armbands in a row of other haggard armbands hanging like flags in dead air. Then a trio of punks sat down in front of the armband grave, one to grab at a guitar strapped to his back, one to flip metallic drumsticks in his hands on to several makeshift drums, and one to grab a megaphone and began to sing in a surprisingly tenor voice.

Bye bye, Soldier.

So late into the night,

We'll go no more a-roving.

Tsuna slid down to the floor with his back to the windows, staring up at the ceiling fan with half an ear to their music.

So this was the Foundation. The one where Kusakabe was the vice-chairman. And Tsuna suspected that Hibari himself was the Chairman. Even if Hibari hadn't said anything, Tsuna had already formed his own conclusions. He had called the school his headquarters. And his personality wouldn't have settled for anything less. Hibari did not take orders from anyone.

Tsuna sat with his knees bent under him, the long school shirt covering the panties.

Why hadn't Hibari said anything?

Then Tsuna laughed. Silly. Had he forgotten so easily? Hibari had promised that Kusakabe would answer his questions for him. Hibari was just waiting.

A great deal comforted by this, Tsuna stood up to browse the bookshelf to kill some time before Hibari came for him.

Two hours passed with Tsuna skimming Pablo Neruda's poetry. The words were blurring into black and white swirls. Then his hands slipped and the book fell to the floor. Tsuna stared at his hands as uncontrollable chills shook through him. Was he relapsing into another fever?

But he didn't feel hungry.

The fever wasn't too high yet. He could still think. And the nausea wasn't there either. He stood up, holding the couch's edge as scaffolding to push him to his feet. Then Tsuna had a brilliant idea. A cold shower would drive the heated fever away.

His thin shoulders shivered. Better yet, a hot shower. To sweat out the fever.

Tsuna vaguely remembered Hibari's warning not to go outside. But the fever was coming back.

He wouldn't mind, would he?

After a few minutes of searching, he found his pants folded in a cabinet. He pulled them on and checked one last time on the crowd outside. Then he left.

Tsuna staggered off to the showers, dredging the path from his memory of schooldays. Curiously, he met no one in the hallways. He supposed they were all outside, enjoying the sun and wind. He briefly felt a pang for the books stacked outside but he honestly didn't want to go outside with so many people there.

He wondered again, where Hibari-san was and what he was doing.

But then Tsuna decided he couldn't be a burden forever. He should deal with this on his own. He didn't want to look pathetic in front of Hibari-san.

When Tsuna reached the showers, he was sweating so much that the uniform was beginning to stick to him. He fingered the leather collar then untied it. He didn't want it to get wet. He placed it in one of the empty lockers then without even taking off any of his clothes turned on a shower knob and let the warm water spray over him. The cotton shirt became translucent, slick and wet and the pants sagged with water.

Tsuna sat on the cool tiles under the shower and felt his fever abate little by little until it reached a plateau. Because of the humidity, the air was fogging around him in a white mist. Tsuna stretched his legs out in front of him and would have dropped off into sleep right then and there if he hadn't run his hand through his hair and felt some of the strands catch. He yelped then stared quizzically at his hands.

Or claws.

A few strands of brown hair had gotten caught on them. Them being white little pointed tips on his fingers, very much like a cat's.

Tsuna would have smashed his fingers against the tiled floor in horror if he hadn't remembered what Hibari had said to him yesterday. About Spinoza and an animal following its nature. Instead, Tsuna tapped the tiles with his claws and a faint almost glassy _plink _sound came out. He tapped out some vague song, enchanted with the sound like rain on wind chimes. A while later, he learned he could retract the claws like a cat.

He grinned goofily at his hands.

He was like a cat. And he even had a collar.

But wait, Tsuna frowned. He liked water. So he wasn't really a cat. Cats hated water. He also didn't eat rats.

There was a small part of Tsuna that was watching this parade of fuzzy thoughts with worry. He was disobeying Hibari. And he didn't have the collar on, leaving his neck feeling naked. And if the fever had abated, why were his thoughts so…weird?

But mostly, Tsuna was comparing himself to a cat and why he couldn't be one.

He didn't have fur for one thing. Or a tail. And another thing, he wasn't graceful at all.

Tsuna squirmed in his wet clothes, happily enjoying the trickle of water down his skin. His claws kept tip-tapping on the tiles, a happy shapeless melody that rose above the patter of the shower water like a clear high soprano. He was timing it to the plastic clock hanging a bit further away, the red second hand his metronome. Fuuta often despaired of teaching him rhythm.

He stopped.

The red hand wavered, hovering between eleven fifty nine and twelve. The shower water floated into inert droplets with thin tails of water streaming upward. Around his feet were small concentric circles of water that had stopped mid-ripple, a geometrical nightmare drafted in water. White scars slithered over Tsuna's arms like snakes converging to swallow him whole. Tsuna's claws danced over the tiles, now a discordant lullaby. He felt his lungs constrict, his heart seize, and his vision tunnel into that second hand indeterminably stuck in limbo.

Fuuta—

_Stop crying or I'll eat you alive._

Tsuna blinked.

_Stop crying or—_

His claws came up to ghost over his neck, the absent collar exerting its presence nonetheless.

_In case you get lost._

The red hand ticked into twelve and the water fast forwarded to hit the tiles and the circles rippled and life continued. Tsuna laughed, somehow relieved, as his scars dwindled again. He rubbed at his eyes and stood up, stumbling a little on unsteady legs. He felt sore all over, as if he'd been running for a long time. In that fog of moisture blinding Tsuna, he felt he was going to be okay. If a little groggy.

Out of the mist, callused hands grabbed his hair and hands.

"Look at this. We got us a faggot." Cruel hands shook Tsuna by his hair while a dirty tennis shoe slid around the curve of Tsuna's right hip. Eyes tearing up, Tsuna scrabbled at the hands and was darkly pleased to hear cries of pain. Tsuna called up that strange strength when he'd beaten that ladon, called up that lightning speed and instinctive flow of muscles but found nothing but an echo in an empty well.

It flashed through his mind, the image of that orderly, his face a portrait of betrayal and hurt as the tray hurtled through the air to lodge itself into his skull. The guard had said it was only a slight concussion. The mix of horror and revulsion and guilt and despair seemed to Tsuna a tornado he was caught inside like a helpless infant. Only a concuss—

"Shit, the pretty faggot cut my hands!"

A brutish looking face filled Tsuna's view. "What the shit, man. I'm just joking around."

"Mochida-sempai, did you see _this_? The kid's wearing girl panties." The other two hands circled Tsuna's hips and pulled down the soggy pants by a few inches, highlighting the wet black lace. "You sure, it's not a girl, sempai? We could have a lot of fun."

A lewd tongue glided down Tsuna's ear and he struggled in their double hold, sick to his stomach. Tsuna's legs were forced underneath him, straddling Mochida with his ankles pinned down by the other thug. His hands were quickly roped behind him by Mochida, the bastard's arms hugging Tsuna's chest to reach his hands.

Mochida's vile breath seeped into Tsuna's ear, whispering. "I don't really care if you're a guy or a girl. I bet you're a slut, wearing something like this," he tugged the black lace up Tsuna's hips and a short sob escaped Tsuna. "I bet you even like it up your ass. Don't cha? You're practically gagging for my cock. I mean, you must have been bored around this place, huh? No one to entertain you, no one to plug your hungry little hole. Well, friend, I'll oblige you."

Sniggering erupted from behind Tsuna's head, the younger thug leaning forward as well to lick down Tsuna's neck.

Tsuna felt bile rise up his throat and would have thrown it up on ugly Mochida's face when he felt his skin pulsate, his DNA resonating to call out. To Hibari-san. To the god who had towered over him and had handed him the collar. To the god who had said not to get lost. To stop crying like a soppy creature. He remembered the note that had warned him not to go outside. He remembered the trade of weapons between the marauders. But most of all, he remembered his helplessness, his dependence on beloved Hibari-san. Angrily, almost petulantly, Tsuna cried out for Hibari.

The air pressure escalated abruptly, higher and higher, a heavy weight pressing down on all of them, heavy enough to feel like a vise squeezing the lungs.

"What the fuck—" younger guy said.

Tsuna stilled.

"C-chairman!" sputtered Mochida.

Hibari was poised in the doorway, tonfas gripped in both hands, deep shadows in his face. Three tined black horns rose from his head, like the harbingers of doom, the gargoyles of old. His eyes had dilated so much that only a thin ring of grey could be seen. Hibari smiled, a chilly curve of the mouth that partly bared his teeth. "Dame-Tsuna. Close your eyes."

Tsuna closed his eyes.

Screams erupted around him as the tonfas whistled through air and Tsuna flopped to the ground, no longer held by anyone, the coarse rope untangling in his freed claws. He clapped his hands to his eyes as the steady sound of flesh pummeled off its owners beat a grisly music of its own in Tsuna's ears. If only he hadn't gone out. If only he had noticed them walking into the showers. If only he hadn't been so pathetic. If so many if's…

But whatever happened, Tsuna kept his eyes closed as Hibari ordered.

After a while, the screams stopped.

"Kusakabe. Take them to the idiot doctor who won't treat men."

There was an agreeing murmur.

A black school jacket was laid on Tsuna, wet and miserable. He was picked up as if he weighed nothing. Still, Tsuna kept his eyes closed. He was slung over a shoulder, an arm holding onto the back of his knees. Even the sudden shift in position did not startle Tsuna into opening his eyes. Instead, he grabbed hold of Hibari's shirt, eyes desperately screwed shut. "Where is the collar?" said Hibari in that frighteningly expressionless tone.

"…in the lockers."

Hibari walked off, the sound of bodies being dragged on the floor a quiet denouement to the music. All the while, Tsuna had his eyes closed.

As if in prayer.

0101010

"Kneel, little animal."

Dripping all over the floor, Tsuna curled up on his knees with his head bowed down and his hands flat on the floor. Hibari's jacket flowed over his thin shoulders like a miniature cape, keeping him warm. It was reassuring. No matter what punishment was doled out, Tsuna had Hibari's jacket and collar.

And wasn't that funny? Tsuna was more scared of what Hibari would do than of what had almost happened. But it made sense. If Hibari abandoned him, he would have no one. Yes, Mochida had been a frightening experience in his own right but maybe deep inside, Tsuna had known Hibari wouldn't have let that crime happen in the school. He hadn't called out to Hibari until the last minute, until the last second. No, Hibari in every universe, would prevent that.

The leather collar was slipped onto his neck.

"Hmph. At least, you're following orders now." Fingers petted the arc of Tsuna's cheekbone, just below his closed eyes. Hibari's heat neared him and he realized he was shaking again as Hibari's hands steadied his shoulders. "You're relapsing into the fever. Yet you didn't fight them off. Why?"

Tsuna shook his head.

But Hibari was quiet, waiting for him to answer.

Forcing dry lips to open, his raspy voice to answer, Tsuna replied, "I don't know."

The orderly's pinched expression came to mind.

A tonfa smashed into the ground three inches from Tsuna's hand. Tsuna's fingers spasmed to find the floor cracking and depressing into a tiny crater. Hibari was furious. Furious enough to hurt him? Tsuna found his cheeks slick with tears, dripping down onto his hands. He bit his lip. And not being able to see Hibari's face like this was worse, because he couldn't even guess what Hibari was thinking.

Then a bundle of cloth nailed him on the head, enough to make Tsuna cringe but not hard enough to sting.

"Open it. And your eyes too, moron."

A grey concrete room greeted him. Hibari was standing some feet away from him, blood stains all over his uniform none of which were his. Here and there on the walls were cracks reaching up to the ceiling. A pile of broken wood sat in one corner and Tsuna finally realized where they were. They were in the gymnasium, a separate building from the school, and the wood were the remains of the bleachers.

Tsuna sat up on his knees and looked at the package in his hands. Old cloth wrapped tightly around itself with the black cross on it. No, it wasn't a cross but an X.

Inside were black leather fingerless gloves which ended with metallic cuffs for his wrists.

He looked up to ask what they were for but only got a glimpse of Hibari running towards him, tonfas swinging before he scrambled out of the way, a hairsbreadth from being crushed against the wall. Hibari kicked off the oncoming wall, rebounding him straight for Tsuna like a bullet.

At his speed, Tsuna could only dodge as he pulled on the gloves, his nerves howling in panic. Why? Why was Hibari—?

No, Tsuna thought, not even then could he dodge as Hibari's tonfa was suddenly there, swinging and jamming onto the metallic cuff of Tsuna's upraised gloved fist. The jarring shock reverberated down to Tsuna's skin, down to muscles and even bone as Hibari leaned down to ask, "Where is it?" as Tsuna shoved him off, Hibari's strange smile unnerving him.

The sound of clanging metal drew Tsuna's eyes and he felt Hibari's chains coil around his ankle and he raised his fist to tear down the burnished iron links in that chain. With his knuckles barely three inches from the chain, Hibari had hauled the chain backwards, flipping Tsuna off his feet flying towards the older god.

Was he punishing Tsuna? Was this his way of disciplining?

As Hibari raised his other tonfa to strike him down, Tsuna's mind angrily buzzed. Hibari-san may be Hibari-san forever and always to Tsuna, but Tsunayoshi was no pet, no goddamn pet. He had survived through the Calamity by himself, survived the ladon and he would survive Hibari's tyrannical personality. His arm shot forward, his fist closing around Hibari's wrist, and he pulled, using the momentum to force Hibari's astonished face to the ground with his other free hand.

But even with Tsuna's weight exacerbated with the speed he was traveling on Hibari's back, Hibari had stopped, his nose a few measly inches from the floor with knees locked.

Then Tsuna was smashed into the wall and Hibari was turning around with that manic grin and his tonfas following close behind to pulverize Tsuna's bleeding head and Tsuna jerked his head to his right and the tonfas, one after the other, fractured the concrete wall and plaster bits rained down on Tsuna. Hibari's eyes slitted down into inhuman grey, "There it is, that strength, that will to live when you faced down the ladon."

Tsuna grabbed Hibari's necktie and jerked him downwards to pound his over controlling self to a pulp. He found his arm locked into place and looking up, saw one of Hibari's chains had fused into the metallic cuff of his glove. By then Hibari had stolen his lips, taking Tsuna's distracted mouth.

Screaming into the kiss, Tsuna bucked against Hibari's built form looming over him.

When that didn't work, Tsuna yanked his head back then smashed it straight into Hibari's forehead.

Hibari staggered back, wiping off trails of his own blood from his cheek. He chuckled.

But Tsuna was already speeding towards him, claws extended and looping Hibari's own chain into a makeshift garrote.

In this way, Hibari trained Tsuna to protect himself for hours in that gym. To draw on his reserves of viral bio-chips. And when Tsuna had worn himself out and collapsed into a deep sleep, Hibari picked him up again like a child. He left his tonfas on the ground as he carried his burden to their office and outside, most of the other Foundation members stopped what they were doing and bowed respectfully to their Chairman. They had all heard. Heard of what happened to Mochida and his kohai.

The crime itself was punishable by exile but that it was directed at Tsuna…well, Hibari left them nearly dead anyway.

Hibari mouthed into Tsuna's pliant shoulders, "_Never disobey me_."

Tsuna slept on, clutching at Hibari's shirt.

0101010

Kusakabe met Hibari in his office with an anxious look.

Hibari ignored him to prop his brunet bundle on the couch. He grabbed one of his cotton formal shirts to replace Tsuna's clothes.

With a pointed glare at Kusakabe who coughed and looked away to the windows, Hibari undressed the fledgling and was pleased to note the bruises healing already. He buttoned up his shirt over Tsuna and slid down Tsuna's panties to replace it with another one, a pink schoolgirl panty with a rabbit on the back.

Then he tucked the fledgling into bed.

Yawning, Hibari gestured for Kusakabe to take a seat. "Proceed with the report."

Kusakabe glanced at the sleeping Tsuna but merely sighed and said, "Chairman, it was five Foundation members we found dead on the road. Wounds indicate someone of monstrous strength. Even the sites of the crimes were completely trashed, as if—"

"As if a Pantheon had stormed through them," commented Hibari.

Uneasy now, Kusakabe blurted out, "Yes, do you think—?" He glanced again at Tsuna. Had Tsuna's owner come looking?

The Foundation members were already short-staffed in maintaining the quarantine boundary. Any more losses could result in holes in the security and those useless walking corpses would walk right through. The dead needed to stay in their places and the Foundation kept them there. Hibari frowned and ignored the question. "Send some scouts into the city. Look for recruits. Double the patrols on the quarantine line." The Foundation, the orphans left behind by the Calamity.

When Kusakabe left with a promise to return and talk with Tsuna, Hibari sat on the bed and pulled Tsuna's legs free from the blankets. While the sight of Tsuna's pink panties peeking from underneath his scrunched uniform shirt was alluring, it was Tsuna's bare feet Hibari was concentrating on. He kept touching Tsuna's feet, as if to memorize their shape, their texture.

He looked up sharply, his nose flaring. Faint static vibrated the air and the smell of burnt ozone percolated through the school.

Reborn had stepped into range, into his city of Namimori.

He dropped Tsuna's foot, blurred in place, and was gone.

0101010

At the farthest edges of Namimori City, sprawled the ruins of an electrical plant. Here in this jungle gym of rusted pylons and thick black wires lay the polished white skull of the titan called Kronos, picked clean by scavengers. His shattered ribcage dotted the ruins like white ivory pillars and the metacarpals of his hand were stuck into ground as monoliths. No still-borns wandered here by edict of Hibari.

As Hibari flickered into view, a shadow spread quickly on the ground alerted him to step back four feet.

A titanide fell out of the air, its body slamming into the ground with deafening noise. It was a mnemosyne, its upper half a female human and its bottom a lengthy twenty meter serpentine tail. Its tail had been squeezed into its mouth, straining and choking it to death as its body writhed in one last death rattle and finally the mnemosyne slumped. Electricity buzzed angrily on its skin then dissipated. It had formed a perfect circle in the sand, a symbolic obol.

"It's been months, Hibari," drawled Reborn as his claws clapped shut on the electrical storm controlling the Mnemosyne. "Why don't you come here and greet your older brother?"


	6. Chapter 6

Disclaimer: Not mine.

AN: Took longer than I thought. Beta is gone which left me quite in a pinch and my laptop's not being cooperative at all. Sorry :(

0101010

It was surprising to find very little difference between titans and gods. Both rely on their supplies of the virus. Both eat it in whatever form they can find. And both are surprisingly humane about their feeding habits, so much so that they have all sworn on a biological code of which the details are not much known. Even I am permitted only very few and vague rules.

It is frustrating.

Suffice it to say, that to disobey the code meant death. The virus in high concentrations is toxic and lethal even for both. And that this death was the death of the mind, the loss of all control, the dreaded destabilization.

And this was where the difference lay in between titans and gods, I am told. The titans chose less immunity but preserved perfect memory. The gods chose the exact opposite.

It is a wonder then, why gods still seem to fall prey to destabilization.

0101010

As the emergency lights shut off, Dr. Irie shouted into his cell, demanding all units to hunt and kill the escapee. The commander at the other line demurred, needing Gen. Reborn's approval first. Dr. Irie nearly let the sob escape. In front of him were rows and rows of glass tanks overflowing with chemicals and mutilated strips of flesh. And at the end of the biohazard room, a jagged hole yawned from ground to ceiling, opening out into the cold desert air.

That bastard had even feasted on the scientists, people entirely devoid of any viral bio-chips.

Dr. Irie limped to the edge of the hole, shivering. He coughed and slid down and sat in a pool of blood. With shaking fingers, he drew mindlessly on the wall with his blood. Long fingers drew loops of flowers on the wall and past the broken edges of concrete was the desert, wide and unforgiving. Flowers in the desert, he thought and vaguely hoped for a better future.

Then the cell phone fell from nerveless fingers.

0101010

Fuuta's ghost never seemed to speak.

Yet his little brother fluttered his lips and his throat muscles rippled in waves and his white teeth gnashed and clicked. His bony chest pulsated like an asthmatic and his wrists had thinned to an alarming degree. Like an anemic, bruises blue and violet bloomed on his pale skin. Old blood decorated his clothes and the smell of old roses hung about him, like a shroud. And that bullet hole on his forehead, the sigil of suicide.

Tsuna wished he could lip-read.

Instead, all he could hear and understand from this ghost was a sub-vocal buzzing that came out of the ghost's mouth, an almost supernatural sound that crawled into his ears and into his brain. Like the sound of a thousand enraged bees, or the sound of dying locusts, or the sound of screaming grasshoppers. The sound burrowed into his skin where Tsuna could feel it digging into flesh, persistent and hungry. Punishing, maybe.

For the ghost of Fuuta who haunted the dark corners in his mind.

Maybe, Fuuta was lonely.

That was why he wouldn't leave.

That was why he couldn't leave.

Fuuta was lonely, dying by himself.

Slow fat tears dripped down Tsuna's cheeks. It was so _frustrating. _Not being able to do anything. Not being able to help. And for the first time, Tsuna gathered what courage he had and spoke to that ghost. Spoke the words he'd always wanted to say but never could. "I'm sorry I didn't die with you."

Fuuta stared at him. Then he bent down to the leaf-strewn path and picked up a ripened pomegranate that had burst open on the ground. He dug around its pale flesh, spilling little pomegranate seeds to the ground, like a heart beating its last precious seconds away. Then he plucked something small and metallic hidden among the lush drops of scarlet red. He gave it to Tsuna, his cold blue-tinged palm open up.

It was Naito's dogtag. With that smiley face.

Fuuta smiled, amusement and tenderness loud and clear in his face.

Tsuna smiled back, haltingly and then fully and widely like the chesire cat. And for a second, he looked exactly like his mother grinning and giggling and yelling how great it was to be alive as she twirled around in their living room to the sound of Beethoven in Iemitsu's antique gramophone as her sons followed in procession.

They ate pomegranate seeds then, in that mist-filled forest in Tsuna's dream.

And it was odd and a little eerie, how Tsuna felt this was their last meeting. But it felt right as Tsuna sipped the last juices of the pomegranate seeds off his hands, to wipe them down his shirt, and to kiss his brother goodbye on his cheek.

And like a crowning moment in a ritual, Tsuna hummed the very last lullaby to send his little brother off to sleep.

The pomegranate trees enfolded the sleeping Fuuta gently in their trunks.

0101010

Tsuna woke up and stretched, his hands wandering the bed and found it empty. He sat up, kicking off the sheets, and felt absolutely ready to take on the world. He grinned goofily at the air and wondered where Hibari-san was and if he would listen to Tsuna's rambling about his dreams. Then he deflated a bit. He hadn't exactly told Hibari-san anything about his family. And the reverse was true. He didn't know anything about Hibari-san's own family.

But if they were related to Hibari, surely they were all amazing as well and had survived the Calamity.

Tsuna stretched his arms, still a little sore from yesterday. His shirt lifted to show new panties, the cycle of female underwear under boy's clothing continued. Tsuna suspected Hibari-san might be perpetrating that cycle.

At the thought of Hibari-san dressing him in the panties, Tsuna's toes curled in pleasure and his cheeks heated in a furious blush.

Tsuna admitted to himself in his own head that he would wear panties anytime for Hibari-san.

Which made his blush ten times worse.

He reflected back on what had happened yesterday. On Mochida, on Hibari's punishment which had become some weird training session. And then that dream with Fuuta. They had eaten pomegranates together, Tsuna thought. Had shared a meal. Then he'd sung le petite prince his funeral march.

Tsuna let the sadness wash away in the quiet of the office.

After a while, Tsuna stood up to peek through the windows again to see if the Foundation delinquents were still outside. He hoped they hadn't seen him being trained by Hibari. Then he remembered what Hibari had said when he'd been training Tsuna, about the will to live. Tsuna beamed at his panties. Hibari-san had trained him and spouted stuff about him living on. The cool-looking Hibari-san respected him!

And maybe…he even liked Tsuna.

Tsuna pressed the palms of his hands against his face, trying to contain the ear-splitting grin and the scorching heat on his cheeks.

The sound of a polite knock at the door had Tsuna diving at the bed and scrambling under the sheets. The door opened and a really odd bullet-shaped hairdo poked through. "Oujo-sama? Are you awake? And decent?"

"Um. Yes to both."

"Good afternoon, oujo-sama. My name is Tetsuya Kusakabe." The odd hairdo entered and following that torpedo-looking hair was the man it was attached to. "I am the Foundation's Vice Chairman and I am the second in command of Hibari-san. If you have any requests, please direct them my way and I will endeavor to procure whatever it is you would like." Kusakabe then knelt on the floor and bowed low.

Tsuna also bowed back, but scrunched his nose in confusion. "Ah, good afternoon. Why are you calling me, er, oujo-sama?"

Kusakabe sat up, still on his knees on the floor. "That is how the Chairman wants you to be addressed by the Foundation members. Unless, he said, you preferred onee-chan."

They were _both_ weird choices. Tsuna made a face but wasn't sure which was better. Well, Hibari-san's first choice had been oujo-sama…and he had already admitted he would do a lot of things for Hibari. The embarrassing stuff too. So he just said, "Whatever you like, I guess. Where's Hibari-sa—"

The screams of sirens interrupted him.

"Do not be alarmed," Kusakabe said, unperturbed. "The sirens are from the quarantine boundary. The school is the safest place in the city and the Chairman would never let anything touch Namimori. Right now, the Chairman is conducting business and is unavailable. Still, is there anything you would like? Green tea, perhaps? The Chairman likes the smell, but unfortunately can't drink it. Would you like something similar? Just for the smell?"

Tsuna kept that tidbit about Hibari-san for later. "Well, um—" he said, a little overwhelmed by the chatty Kusakabe.

"Oh, excuse me, I almost forgot," Kusakabe reached back into the hallway and pulled a folder through the doorway. He stood up to give it to Tsuna but returned to his position on the floor. "The Chairman wanted me to compile some information for you."

On top of the folder were the words, _Notes of Dr. Irie._

Tsuna read and read and Kusakabe waited.

After a while, the sirens stopped.

The air had noticeably dropped in temperature.

Then Tsuna reached the end and closed the folder.

He looked at the bed for a while then looked at Kusakabe.

"…Could I have some pants and shoes?"

"Of course. But might I ask, is there somewhere you're planning to go?" said Kusakabe.

Tsuna stared at the windows, feeling his stomach sinking to the floor. "...Something's coming. It's not stopping at all."

0101010

It was a misleading gift, the mnemosyne.

It was a warning.

Of what Reborn could do to him.

Hibari did not scream as the current rippled across his muscles in an electric seizure. His eyes had rolled backwards into his head and his mouth opened into a frozen snarl as dark bluish lines of venous and capillary congestion broke out on his skin like poisonous roots. This smell of burning hair, a sulfurous smog that clogged his nose, compounded the growing wall of pain circling his mind and all he could see and feel was this prison.

"You stole him. Did you relish him, little brother?" Reborn asked in an indulgent tone, his gloved hands gripping Hibari's tonfas, the arc of lighting running through the metal to Hibari's skin. "Did you taste his sweet skin and foul his flesh with your mouth?"

He remembered the Pantheon logo on those handcuffs, its repugnant weight on Tsuna's bony wrists.

_Detestable_.

White hot rage, forged like an iron sledgehammer, smashed through the prison closing up on Hibari as his tonfas dislocated Reborn's shoulder. It popped out, interrupting the electric flow but Reborn simply grabbed the titan with his unbroken arm and hurled him at the rusted chain link fence.

Hibari crashed into them, uprooting the fence as it collapsed onto him.

Reborn snapped his shoulder back into place, used to the pain.

He stretched the shoulder experimentally and said, "I don't want to kill you, Hibari. You're an unparalleled specimen for a titan. It would be a shame because there are only so few of you left." He picked up a coil of barbed wire from the debris, looking at it thoughtfully. "If you return Tsuna, order will be restored. Two more electrocutions like that might even permanently destabilize you and I _will_ regret that."

Hibari climbed to his feet, the viral bio-chips rapidly erasing the damage on him, knitting burnt flesh anew. "Regret? Don't be stupid. A creature like you cannot feel regret."

"Such a predictable answer," Reborn said. He whipped the barbed wire outward and it flew towards Hibari's bleeding face.

Hibari's chains met it head-on, hitting its trajectory off course.

Reborn smiled.

His electricity barreled along the barbed wire and arced onto Hibari's chains and towards his little brother's vulnerable hands.

"Roll," Hibari commanded, slicing off the chains with claws.

Hovering pulleys screeched in the air above them, hauling the knot of Hibari's chains and barbed wire upwards and backwards towards Reborn, the chains and wires forming a net of lightning, too wide for Reborn to escape.

Reborn didn't need to.

He slammed his fists into the ground, the debris flying to intercept the net of live wires.

It was a mistake.

Smoke, dust, and debris clouded his vision and the sound of drilling metal alerted him too late, as Hibari's chains sawed right through the debris and through Reborn's shoulders, its toothed links sinking viciously into muscle. More chains rapidly spun around his limbs, metallic teeth hooking into him. Reborn snagged what he could in his bound hands, electricity exploding off his claws, hot enough to melt bits of chain-links off him and to liquidate Hibari's internal organs.

Hibari flicked into view behind him and slugged Reborn's head with a tonfa just as Reborn caught the movement and slammed a bristling hand full electricity against Hibari's elbow, fracturing hundreds of fault lines along the bone.

Nonetheless, it sent Reborn hurtling into the air.

More and more chains like living vines impaled themselves on Reborn, who'd sprawled to a stop on the ground. They had cocooned themselves tighter around his hands, shackling them to the ground.

Reborn started laughing wildly even as the chains tightened around him like a noose, needle-like teeth puncturing deeper.

Hibari dropped his left tonfa, the arm completely useless now. The nerves had been fried, the muscles dead. It would take the bio-chips longer than a week to regenerate the dead tissue. But his right arm was more than capable of exterminating Reborn. A pounding migraine was pressing against his skull until all he could focus on was destroying the cause of it. That _condescending _bastard, laughing at him.

Hibari squeezed the chains until Reborn stopped. "A creature like you cannot regret anything. Not the death of my minions, not my death, and not even Tsuna's death if he matures into a titan." Hibari reeled Reborn's body to a stand, a darkly bleeding fissure on his head.

For a moment, Reborn looked confused about his words but that contemptuous sneer once again filled his face.

"Regret requires memory to feel contrite over." Behind Hibari, some of the chains had burrowed into the desert soil, ending in blackened bubbling patches of earth from Reborn's last attack. Hibari had manipulated the flow of electricity with his chains, grounding it into earth, rendering it harmless. "I was surprised you even remembered the Pantheon and me."

Reborn spit out a bit of his tongue he'd bitten off. He grinned, blood on his teeth, tongue growing again like a lizard. "And? You want Tsuna to end up like you? In danger of losing stability every second?"

"It's up to him," Hibari said. "I don't much care. But it's his decision which life to choose, which risks to take." He raised his tonfas, the chains shrieking around its length in a whirl of teeth to saw off Reborn's head. "Which inherent nature to follow."

The chainsaw stopped an inch from Reborn's neck as the blare of sirens from every outpost tower shrieked out.

It had also stopped Reborn's claws an inch from Hibari's forehead, electricity sparking off his mangled fingers, having torn them free from the handcuffs.

0101010

Hibari: Second Oldest of the Darwin System's experiments. The only stable Titan in existence. MIA. Insignia: Three black horns.

Destabilization: Death of the mind. Loss of complete control, at the mercy of devastating hunger. Side-effects seem to include a simultaneous loss of higher-order thinking and of occult-like powers, and severe mutation of the body in random intervals. The very first known case of destabilization had been Dr. Kronos Hibari. It was then his son, Reborn, imprisoned him in a jail of twisted electrical pylons and a mental oubliette of repetitious REM sleep that never ended. Recently received news that the second son killed him.

Predator and prey are locked in an arms race in the food chain, evolving ever more complicated defenses and attacks. To survive, one had to eat. Which meant death for something else. It is just a fact of nature. There is no morality in eating and I wonder if that is true, then the walking corpses are helpless to their own inherent fnature. Moreso, for these gods and titans who are condemned to knowingly eat remnants of human beings.

I pity them.

-From the Notes of Dr. irie.

0101010

Riding behind Kusakabe on the motorcycle, Tsuna clutched tighter on the leather coat the man was wearing. All around them, massive black clouds were assembling and a metallic tang flavored the air and the temperature was dropping fast to a freezing chill. Thunder rumbled and the ground pulsated with distant shockwaves, small rocks and sand scurrying like terrified insects. And Tsuna could feel them, these older ones. Three of them farther on.

One was Hibari.

One was that distant memory of the god who called him hatchling.

And one…was _wrong. _This third one, he grated on Tsuna's mind, like teeth biting into foil.

Tsuna's stomach was boiling with terror and he was shivering from that sickening third one, its very presence a type of living poison that seeped into the air and into the ground and into the organisms around him. What was it? Why did feel so…?

And why was it so familiar?

But Hibari-san was there. Hibari-san was there fighting this monster. Tsuna could feel his exhaustion, his rapidly depleting strength. The second one was dangerously close to winking out of existence, much more than Hibari-san was. Tsuna couldn't let them. He couldn't lose anyone anymore.

He remembered Hibari-san sliding his fingers through Tsuna's hair.

Hold on, Hibari-san_. _Tsuna pleaded, hold on.

Up ahead, forks of lightning stabbed into the earth with a peal of crackling thunder. And a distant scream.

Tsuna's pupils dilated.

He slid off the back of the bike, his breath stopped up with shock in his throat. Kusakabe was swiveling his bike, yelling, eyes wide and panicked. And Tsuna was thinking, no. No. It would not end like this. His ears ringing with tinnitus, Kusakabe's voice muffled, and Tsuna breathed out.

He slammed to his knees on the ground.

The white maggoty scars on his hands sprouted over his skin, drowning out reason and logic. It spread and spread until it had covered the whole of Tsuna's body, a shifting mass of snakes on his skin. He stood up, his scabbed knees zipping up the lines of open wounds. His eyes oscillated wildly and dark spots were creeping into his vision. Tsuna breathed in, a single word, then he blurred and was gone.

Kusakabe sat on the bike, gripping the handlebars.

Tsuna had said Hibari-san's name.

0101010

It flitted among the shadows of metallic debris, the soft _click click _of its joints sliding in and out of its misshapen sockets. Despite its size, it was fast—faster than even Hibari or Reborn. Reborn was crumpled beside him, breathing shallowly as blood streamed down his mouth. Reborn's arm was gone, his sleeve flapping in the wind. His older brother wouldn't be able to run anymore, Hibari thought as he calculated their odds.

Hibari cursed. He'd exhausted himself. Training Tsuna, beating the shit out of Reborn, and now this.

He stared at Reborn, dazedly looking at his empty sleeve.

Hibari grinded his teeth. Death would have been better, easier even. That _bastard_ was toying with them, snipping bits off them with gleeful curiosity. In this pouring rain, the ground was slicked into ankle-deep mud in seconds and the air too heavily saturated to be safe for Reborn to use any of his electrical tricks even _with _one hand. Too dangerous either for him to fight it out on ground.

Both siblings, one-armed in battle against a fucking destabilized freak.

Fine, Hibari thought. Not on the ground. He hauled his older brother onto his shoulder and leaped onto one of the few standing pylons. Higher and higher, he climbed, dragging his almost-comatose brother. He spared a brief burst of anger at the fact that Namimori Electrical Company was even more wrecked by both battles. He stopped, high up on his perch with a bird's eye-view of the ruins in the desert, a tactical advantage. He would see where the bastard would strike.

Reborn was still quiet.

Hibari hitched Reborn further up on his shoulder and called on more chains into his hand, his aggression rising against the backdrop of numbness and fatigue spreading in his body. There had been three crimes committed against him today. He remembered the bits of leather in the monster's mouth and had known that it hadn't been Reborn who'd killed his Foundation members. Then the added destruction to Namimori and he suspected, some of the boundary towers. Lastly, he felt the weight of his brother on his shoulder.

The shithead was going to pay.

Only a Hibari was allowed to kill another Hibari.

Kyouya grinned at the darkness, teeth white and sharp as his chains rose in the freezing air, tipped with a fleur-de-lise spike on each chain. They stood straight around him, a forest of chains hanging in the air. He caught a flicker of shadows and the chains dive-bombed at it, cutting through air and rain in a flash of black steel.

It skittered under the mud, its carapace camouflaged in it as the spikes skidded off its slick enamel shell.

With that telling movement, Kyouya could see it had coiled itself around the base of the transmission tower he was on.

It shot towards him, the monster the size of a subway train.

Kyouya slitted his eyes, triggered the hidden chains creeping along the sides of the tower, trapping the monster mid-air. Metal screamed against metal as Kyouya's chains were strained against their limit, the weight of the abomination too heavy for the chains to hold on for long. Kyouya gritted his teeth, the dizziness and nausea blurring his vision as he summoned more and more chains to clamp onto the monster to rend it in half as a medieval torture rack would.

It screeched, a hair-raising sound and Kyouya reveled in it, in his victory. He bared his teeth—

Until its tail tore the tower's foundations out the ground, and both brothers plummeted downwards. Free-falling fifty meters down with shredded metal debris raining around him, that was when Kyouya saw Tsuna running towards them. Even this far, Kyouya could see the intense heat Tsuna was radiating, enough to distort the air around him, enough that the rain hitting him steamed in a white trail of smoke, like a comet. He chuckled even as he tucked his older brother securely behind him so that he would hit the ground first.

Reborn wouldn't be any fun dead.

0101010

Tsuna didn't want to forget. Didn't want to forget all the people who had died for him. He wanted the pain, he wanted the sadness, he wanted to be to remember them for their courage.

As he was running in the rain, he was aware of each tiny water droplet hanging in the air suspended by time. He was aware that on his skin, white scars had hardened into scales, a pattern of interlinked circles. He was aware of ants nesting underground, of lizards scrambling through the waterpipes, of scraggly grass shivering in patches. And in front, his vision had tunneled into a small fish eyed view of the electrical plant, the horizon curving around the stormy skies and the crumbling tower slowing down in its descent in bent arcs.

And the focus of his view, that monster slithering free.

It was catapulting itself towards the debris, bouncing off the chains as a slingshot. It was targeting something. Hibari and the other one.

Time slowed further and Tsuna blurred, speeding faster and faster.

Tsuna caught a hanging chain and kicked off the ground, swinging him sky-high like an acrobat. He could see its painfully stretched spine sticking out of ripped skin. Hundreds and hundreds of warped ribs scuttled in the air like a millipede's legs. Purple streaks ran in alternating stripes across the tattered skin and into the enamel shell and they glowed with chemical heat. And he could see its oversized mandibles beginning to open to swallow something midair. Tsuna caught hold of the last links of vertebrae of the tail and he instantly looped the chain through the holes of the vertebrae, round and round.

The monster's mandibles were five feet away from Hibari-san and the other god in a storm of falling debris.

This far, Hibari-san's clear grey eyes were focused on him.

Hibari-san's lovely smokey eyes.

Tsuna smiled at him, eyes scrunched in affection.

Four feet from Hibari-san.

Holding the chains around his thin wrist, Tsuna cheekily blew a kiss to Hibari-san as he dived off, hauling the chain backwards. The chain links shrieked, rolling through the holes of the monster's vertebrae.

Tsuna crashed to the ground, tumbling head over heels.

Two feet.

The chain tautened under his grip as Tsuna pulled, straining his legs against the monster's momentum, sweat dripping down.

The monster halted mid-jump, only a foot away from swallowing Hibari-san.

It seemed to float for a moment, fury and frustration in its molten face.

Tsuna heaved, muscles burning in agony and a fierce joy lighting his face. The abomination swung backwards, like a pendulum and it hurtled downwards in Tsuna's direction. Tsuna whipped the chains to the right, where several monolithic metacarpals had been embedded into the mud.

It slammed into them, impaling its soft underbelly on them, its weight driving itself downwards.

It struggled to free itself, tail pounding mindlessly where it had last seen Tsuna.

Its ribs stretched out and out and jackhammered into the ground, attempting to skewer Tsuna.

Skidding around the mud to dodge them, Tsuna frantically calculated. The abomination was too full, its aura too large. No matter how many times Tsuna attacked it, it would regenerate and regenerate from its nearly limitless supply of the virus. Already, the puncture holes in its body were closing around the mutated metacarpals and it would be free to move again.

Nearly limitless life, Tsuna thought.

The white scales on his skin shifted, the interlinked circles plaiting themselves into a dizzying pattern of knotted leaves and vines. Under a torrent of rain in the expanse of that desert, Tsuna's heartbeat slowed, his lungs inhaled, and his feet stopped running.

The raindrops froze, hanging by glistening tails.

A bone tip hung above Tsuna's head, a few seconds more until it smashed through his skull.

The pomegranate seeds.

It was a symbol of fecundity, wasn't it? Because it had so many seeds, so many possibilities, so many futures waiting to happen. Of many lives waiting to flower and flourish. Tsuna began crying and laughing. All this time. All this time, Fuuta had been telling him something. Been trying to give him something.

All those pomegranate seeds.

Tsuna whispered, "Grow."

Brown roots burst forward from his palms, growing exponentially in the air, branching out thousands and thousands of times several miles above the abomination. A fine mesh of gliding roots hooked into the monster and drilled themselves into its body and into the ground. Trunks thick and thin sprouted over it, rising high as skyscrapers, diverging out into more and more branchlets. Leaves exploded into clusters, verdant green in their veins. Pink star-shaped flowers surged up everywhere, permeating the air with a sweet burnt sugary fragrance under the petrichor.

The rain came down again, thudding against wood and plopping against leaves.

The monster stilled, its ribs folding under the weight of the roots, its nearly limitless life being sucked away.

In the distance, two trails of dust from opposite directions were driving nearer and nearer the ruins of the electric factory.

Tsuna stared up at the largest tree he'd ever seen in his life in the middle of that desert.

A little while later, the flowers started falling. Vans started parking behind him, the Pantheon logo dominating the black chrome. Motorcycles were warily rolled a little farther away from them, the Foundation always suspicious of any authority other than Hibari's. By this time, Tsuna had started digging under the debris.

Col. Nello and Kusakabe then came to a silent agreement and ordered the remaining factions under their control to help clean the ruins, to find their respective leaders.


	7. Chapter 7

Disclaimer: Not mine.

0101010

"Look, I don't really deal with biological anatomies, just robotic ones." Spanner said, waving the sheaf of papers in his hand.

Col. Nello glared at him. "But they said you finished a degree in medicine. They said you finished seven damn doctorates by the time you were twenty."

Spanner sucked his lollipop more insolently than was possible. "Well, bodies _are _boring, being squishy all over the place."

"You sick godda—"

"Mr. Nello, please." Kusakabe interfered. "Mr. Spanner has already attended to Hibari-san and Reborn-san and was merely baiting you."

"He _what_?" With that Col. Nello charged down the corridor with Spanner and Kusakabe in tow. "Then where are they? Why haven't you told me? Where's Tsuna? Have you told him? They're in lab five, right? That was the only undamaged lab after that bastard—" Col. Nello punched in the code, swearing left and right about that white-haired turncoat. "—and so help me god, I will—"

He stopped as Kusakabe coughed and Spanner behind him muttered, "And that was why I was trying to distract you from seeing them."

Tsuna had just unbent from kissing the younger Hibari's nose.

He flushed bright red, having been caught red-handed. "I, um. I was, I was just checking his temperature!"

"Sure kid, you were. You've been _checking _Hibari's temperature since ten minutes ago," Spanner said as he walked forward to check on his sleeping patients on the hospital beds. He grabbed the monitor screen for both the Hibari siblings' progress, scanned it, then typed in a couple more commands and notes. "Not bad. Just a few more injections from nasty white millipede monster in the next two weeks or so, and they'll wake up. Can't have them overdosing which is what caused your Byakuran to destabilize in the first place."

Col. Nello didn't seem to hear him, was still pale and stricken.

"Kid. You and me. We gotta talk. Come on." He marched right out again.

Tsuna looked at Spanner and Kusakabe.

Kusakabe nodded at him to reassure Tsuna that he would look after Hibari. Spanner just waggled the stick of his lollipop in his mouth.

Without much protest from either one, Tsuna followed after Col. Nello.

They ended up in a storage room of cardboard boxes full of files. It was dusty and dark, perfect for dark business. It might have made Tsuna nervous if he wasn't so worried about Hibari-san. As it was, Tsuna just waited impatiently for Col. Nello to say his piece so Tsuna could go back to Hibari-san's side.

"Look," Col. Nello said as he leaned against the concrete wall. "It's none of my business, really. But Reborn's such a—" He wiped a frustrated hand over his face. "He's, well. Okay, it's none of my business who you like or not like, god forbid I'm talking like a six year old girl, but I mean, Reborn's been…wait, do you even know who Reborn is?"

"Um, yes." Tsuna fidgeted, feeling his ears burning. "I remember him. When I was…in the tank. He visited me a lot, called me hatchling."

"Oh." Col. Nello was quiet, a bit disturbed and a bit sympathetic. But he was a man on a mission, and so bulldozed into the topic tactlessly. "Give Reborn a chance. He's a nice guy. Real elegant and smooth. Dependable. First class. And besides, he's sort of fixated on you. I mean, the guy has a pet name for you, for god's sake, can he get any more obvious?"

"I won't leave the younger Hibari-san." And there it was, the silent steel under soft brown eyes.

Col. Nello regarded Tsuna. "Kyouya isn't exactly the most stable person around."

Tsuna smiled. "Neither am I."

"You don't know much about the Hibari's, do you?" asked Col. Nello, almost rhetorically. When Tsuna shook his head in confirmation, Col. Nello sighed. "I suppose I shouldn't lie. All the Hibari's are _dangerous_ people. I'm warning you now. Either one," Col. Nello shrugged. "—you stay with one of them long enough and you'll understand. They're _catalysts._" He said the word with distaste. In his opinion, the world had already seen too much change. Two active Hibari's running around, heading two of the biggest survival institutions wasn't the greatest idea.

"Their father too," Col. Nello said with a pinched expression.

"Who—?"

"You wouldn't know him." Col. Nello said. "He wasn't much for the political scene and after that, well. The brothers keep a tight lid on what happened. And Reborn's erased the whole fucking memory from his DNA, that's how much he hated the old man."

Tsuna bit his lip. "Oh. Why are you telling me this?"

"I think you should know what you're getting mixed up with." Col. Nello said, his mouth a grim line. "Did you know? The Hibari's practically own Namimori City. Of course, it's just a ghost town now with all the evacuations but back in its heyday, it was one of the biggest metropolitan cities on the continent."

"That explains a lot of things," Tsuna said thinking about Hibari's behavior.

"The head of the house at the time was Dr. Kronos Hibari. Hell of a man. Hell of a scientist. Obsessed with the übermensch, with eliminating all flaws in dna coding—"

"Umm…"

Col. Nello shook his head. "I keep forgetting. You're still a kid, right? Haven't even gone to college yet? Übermensch, sort of like Superman. The ideal of perfection. A god above the herd with a vision for the world." Col. Nello dug around his flak jacket's pockets. He took out a cigarette and lit it and dragged a smoke. "Of course, his obsession spilled to his kids. It was like living in a Skinner box the whole time. There were experiments and physical examinations and combat simulations. There were classes in weapons training, in survival contingencies, in counter-intel tactics and increasing memory recall and reaction time. There were courses in politics, multiple language, and socio-economics and psychological warfare."

Col. Nello laughed. "The two were being groomed to be leaders and commanders. And all the while, Dr. Hibari kept notes on how fast they were progressing, on what mistakes they kept making, on the weaknesses they seemed to accumulate."

Tsuna felt a growing numbness at those words. He wondered how the siblings had survived and immediately wished he hadn't. "…Why did I see Hibari-san back in school? I mean, he—"

"Wasn't a student." Col. Nello shrugged. "He was patrolling. Reborn did too but on the other side of the city. One of their _duties_," Col. Nello spat. "A Hibari did not neglect what was in his care. Dr. Hibari was big on that, in leading the herd. When the Calamity hit, it was Dr. Hibari's idea to mesh the virus with nanobots. Tried it on the whole family."

Tsuna swallowed bile. "Why? Why would he do that?"

The blond smiled at him, baring white teeth. "He wanted them to _survive_, to be at the top of the food chain"

He inhaled another puff, as if preparing himself to dive into murkier topics. He gave Tsuna a flat look. "The irony of it was that he would destabilize into an unstable monster who would swallow one of his own sons whole. And Reborn would use what he learned to beat the bastard down and pull his younger brother out of his living father's slit stomach. I heard Kyouya finally killed the fucker. Good on him. But I can't blame him for being pissed that Reborn chose to forget everything."

Col. Nello left Tsuna after that in the storage room, a trail of grey smoke behind him. Tsuna mildly thought that if anything, Col. Nello was exactly like the Hibari's. Birds of a feather and all that in revolutionizing someone's worldview.

With jumbled thoughts and conflicting emotions, Tsuna wandered back to Hibari-san's side in the lab.

Where he was immediately seized by the blond doctor, Spanner.

"There you are. I was wondering what the colonel would do to you. I have some questions I'd like to ask you."

"Um." Tsuna looked longingly at Hibari-san, still asleep. "Shouldn't we separate them? Hibari-san and his brother?"

Spanner flicked one eye towards his patients and shrugged. "Afraid they'll get into another tussle? Nah. Magic of drugs will keep them sedated for a while. Why don't you and me go on a date?" He said while hauling Tsuna's arm along, not much noticing Tsuna's stuttered proclamations of being sort of taken already. _By whom_ didn't even need to be asked. Spanner thought he was cute, being all shy discretion about his sappy devotion to his sick Hibari-san, all big brown eyes scrunched in anxiety.

"So, I heard you've got awesome gardening powers," said Spanner as he marched Tsuna briskly down another corridor.

Tsuna blushed furiously and muttered, "I know it's sort of lame—"

"You're sort of like Persephone, then? Kidnapped by big bad boss guy, comes back as goddess of spring married to said guy, having tamed and whipped the man into shape."

Tsuna laughed, a little bit easier with the breezy attitude of the blond. "I don't think Hibari-san would appreciate being called tamed or whipped. And I'm not really a goddess, because I'm a boy. A titan. I mean, at least now, I can tell the difference between a god and a titan."

Spanner hummed around his lollipop. "True. But some say Persephone was originally one of the older chthonic gods anyway. Oops—I mean goddesses."

Tsuna wondered if he'd let the gender mistake slip intentionally.

"Anyway, I want you to demonstrate. I want you to grow plants in the desert. What exactly happens when you grow plants? Do you feel something different?" Spanner's non-stop questions wobbled his lollipop dangerously loose. "Do you go into a trance? Do you generate heat like the other two? Do you need a starting point of some seeds hanging dormant in the ground? If you answer my questions, I'll give you a lollipop." He popped out the one he had. It was appropriately in the shape of a spanner.

"They're delicious and hand-made, too." Spanner gave his I'm-such-a-genius smile at the suitably impressed Tsuna. "And then I can finally say you've sucked my junior spanner—_Kidding! _Just kidding." He added hastily at the look Tsuna was giving him.

Then they finally reached an automatic door with a keycard slot. Spanner fished his id from the many pockets lining his coat and continued his monologue. "I just want to observe the whole process and ask you some questions afterwards. Then a medical check-up to see if there's any harmful physiological effects. I'll nag you later on to do another demonstration with an MRI helmet or something to record your brainwaves. Then a CAT scan and an x-ray and some blood and urine tests. I'll bring in a botanist and microbiologist to analyze the plants and a psychologist to analyze you—"

He slid the id into the slot and the doors hissed open.

"You're really excited about this." Tsuna said, a bit nonplussed at all the fuss. He wondered a bit why he wasn't scared to be under another scientist's thumb but when that scientist was sucking a lollipop and explaining every step of the way, it wasn't hard to trust him.

Spanner raised an eyebrow. "Well, aren't you? Right now, the ecosystem's in a bad state. And your magical green thumb will invigorate the restorative ecology research into _light speed. _You could probably restore the world forty percent back into its past prime, never mind the research material you're providing us with."

"Oh." Tsuna said with a surprised smile.

"Well, go on." Spanner indicated the ground right next to the building. "Some plants here."

Tsuna nodded.

He bit his thumb and blood beaded out. He squeezed, letting it fall. The wind rose in speed and the air became damp with humidity and his eyes went gold. "Wake up," he said. From where his blood had fallen, small sprouts started growing, leaves pushing out of the ground. It grew higher and higher until it was about three feet high, green leaves unfurled like sails and pink star-shaped flowers opening with a sigh.

Spanner crouched down to mumble and poke at the plant. "…definitely a new species. Not something I've seen before."

Tsuna sat down next to him, folding his legs underneath him. "Um. I think I know why."

"Yeah?"

"This is the same one as the first one I grew." Tsuna said, his eyes on the flowers. "They come from the virus. I mean, that their seeds _are_ the virus. They still do photosynthesis and stuff but I just sort of nudged them to do it faster."

"Huh." Spanner rubbed his chin. Then he dug around another pocket and produced a balled up tissue. He unwrapped it and took out some apple seeds.

It was common sense to hoard whatever seeds they had.

"Here. See if it works on other plants."

Tsuna picked them up and walked a little further away from the building. Then he poked some holes into the ground with his fingers. He dropped the seeds in. And he could feel their little embryonic cells waiting to flourish, waiting to stand up high under the sun, and embrace what freedom and independence they could.

This time, he didn't even need the words anymore as his eyes flashed golden and there burst from the ground apple trees under Eve's watchful eyes.

0101010

After some time when Tsuna had managed to escape Spanner's clutches, he attended the funeral rites for the dead left in the wake of Byakuran's destruction. Soldiers and scientists, the best of their generation, gone. Dr. Irie had been one of them.

Other humans whispered, looking back at him with fearful prejudiced eyes.

Monster.

Cannibal.

Inhuman.

Tsuna held his head high. On his neck was the reassuring weight of Hibari-san's collar.

And after the dead were buried and everyone had long gone and all the stars had come out, Tsuna bit at his fingers to splatter his blood far and wide on the graveyard and there grew a tangle of pink star-shaped flowers. To remember them for the lives they lived.

After, Tsuna was tired and fell asleep next to Hibari-san's bed.

It seemed so long ago since Tsuna heard Hibari-san's voice.

0101010

Hibari snapped wide awake on the hospital bed. He stared down at his hand where Tsuna was drooling on it, asleep. A little bit ticked off but still mostly amused, Hibari slipped his fingers into the warmth of Tsuna's snoring mouth. He dug around Tsuna's mouth, sliding his fingertips against slick teeth, casually possessive in his exploration. Tsuna choked and gurgled, finally waking up. Watery brown eyes looked up at him.

"Nurse Sawada. I'm bored." Hibari said as he flexed his fingers, stretching Tsuna's mouth wide.

Tsuna darted a look at his brother's sleeping form in anxiety.

Hibari felt a brief implacable urge to shove his brother out the window. But when Tsuna looked back at him with beseeching eyes, the moment passed and he took out his fingers to rub the soft dip on Tsuna's neck. "Um, Hibari-san—?"

"Don't call me that," Definitely annoyed now, Hibari thought. "My _name_ is Kyouya."

"K-Kyouya-_san—" _Tsuna gasped out, flushing bright red. "Um. We can't. Can't play now. In front of Reborn-san."

Chains sped out to cuff Tsuna's wrists and ankles. Hibari clenched his fist and the chains obeyed, swiftly tying Tsuna's arms behind him. Then he flicked his fingers in a come-here gesture. The chains rolled and neatly deposited Tsuna into Hibari's lap. Hibari reached behind Tsuna to slice off the chains not binding his arms. With nothing else holding him up and with Tsuna unbalanced on his knees around Hibari's hips, he fell face-first into Hibari's chest.

"Mff. Kyouya-san, _your brother might wake up_."

"…Good idea," Hibari said. "Kusakabe."

The door slid open and the Vice-Chairman leaned his head in. "Yes, Hibari-san?"

"Kick him out," Hibari nodded at Reborn still comatose.

Kusakabe went to wheel Reborn's hospital bed somewhere else. Not really paying attention after that, Hibari palmed the plump swell of Tsuna's buttocks. Who squeaked at him.

"That was a nice sound," Hibari commented. He squeezed again, wanting to hear it a second time around.

Tsuna just frowned into Hibari's t-shirt. "Kyouya-san? …Is your brother going to be okay? I mean, his arm, it's…gone."

Hibari frowned at the brown head resting on his shoulder. "…That amount of living tissue gone? Even the virus can't recreate that much. If he'd just lost a hand, maybe."

"Oh."

That left a bad taste in his mouth, Hibari thought. Tsuna worrying over his brother. "It's not hard to make prosthetics," Hibari said as he fingered the perfect curve on Tsuna's hip.

"…I want to tell you a story," Tsuna said.

Hibari listened to Tsuna talk as the fledgling's warm weight leaned on him. About his days during the Calamity when he'd picked up a metallic bat and killed his infected mother to save his own little brother. About picking up a gun and killing more walking corpses to protect the ragtag team of survivors in a building. And coming back to find Fuuta had shot himself. About the dogtag a friend had given him, a symbol of hope in a bleak future. About the Heinlein Hospital and about the laboratory experiments and the red-haired doctor and the kind-hearted soldier. About his nightmares where Fuuta showed up in a mist-filled forest.

By then, Tsuna's voice was hoarse and his eyes were red, red, red.

He was trembling but he was digging his forehead into Hibari's shoulder, as if to physically anchor himself.

And then, Tsuna started talking about the dream he had, about Fuuta smiling back at him and eating pomegranate seeds with him. About what he thought that meant, about redemption and death and life after that. About rising back up after grief and finding a new future, finding a new family. And it meant Tsuna could never give up those memories, of all those people in his life even at the cost of pain.

For Tsuna, forgetting was true death.

Hibari closed his eyes and pulled Tsuna in to kiss his mouth. To drink in that strength, that audacity to live even in a hellish world like this.

Tsuna leaned back from the kiss and in a perfectly serious voice said that he wanted to save the world.

Hibari started laughing and it felt good and filled him with an unbearable lightness, like a balloon on a string.

He kissed Tsuna's lovely mouth over and over again.

And he said to that gutsy little animal, "Okay, we will."

0101010

It was embarrassing to call Hibari by his first name. Yes, Tsuna had managed it and yes, he'd done it dozens of times now. But it was oddly…_intimate _to call him Kyouya. But Tsuna had promised to himself before, he would do anything for Hibari-san. Or as the case may be, Kyouya-san.

But it didn't mean, he'd forgotten. He still remembered Reborn, the god who'd called him hatchling and who'd watched over him and who'd almost been like a father. Those dopamine imprinting moments as Dr. Irie's notes called them had not left Tsuna apathetic. He harbored a small spark of affection for this dark-eyed god who seemed more lost than even he was. This was Kyouya-san's older brother, the older brother who had done all he could to save Kyouya, even if it meant tearing up their own father.

So how could he refuse Reborn's request to speak with him?

When Reborn woke up, when Kyouya-san started sporting that murderous look, and when the various retainers of both leaders began to twitch and glance at each other in obvious suspicion, Tsuna decided to end it then and there.

Kyouya-san had taken him aside and demanded, "Only twenty minutes. I already feel like killing him all over again."

"But you never did," Tsuna said. "Anyway, you're being unfair. Kyouya-san gets to talk with other people all the time and I don't complain."

"Fine. I won't speak more than twenty minutes with other people besides you."

Tsuna laughed. "I didn't know you had such an odd sense of humor."

Kyouya-san narrowed his grey eyes. "Twenty."

"Thirty…and I'll, um, make you green tea—"

"Twenty-five and you'll wear a girl's kimono for a whole day."

Tsuna frowned.

Kyouya-san shrugged. "The Foundation won't be there. They'll be on patrol."

And he could defend himself now anyway, Tsuna thought to himself. And really, what was one day? "Deal." He stuck out a hand and Kyouya-san shook it, his grip like steel and his smile like a cat with a belly full of cream.

Kyouya-san was really handsome like this.

Tsuna tried to curb the growing grin on his face. He knew what Kyouya-san's weaknesses were now, what could put a dent on that cool and unruffled surface. And if it took Tsuna in girl's clothing and bondage items to make Kyouya-san happy…

Well.

Tsuna smiled at his toes on his sandals.

Maybe tamed was the right word.

0101010

They were leaving today and Spanner had already taken as much tests and samples he could from Tsuna. He'd already promised he would visit again to check up on Tsuna's green thumb and Tsuna had agreed even if Kyouya-san had merely quirked his lip downwards.

They were outside with three Pantheon army trucks being packed with supplies and some machinery that Reborn was supposedly giving to the Foundation and Tsuna tried not to think too much on that, on how it sounded like a bridal dowry. He was pretty sure it wasn't. Really.

Kusakabe meanwhile, was already ordering several of his crew to start their patrols as they were behind schedule in relieving some of their guards on shift.

Col. Nello had, before saying goodbye, told him that he would take care of the growing hatred against the Pantheon and titans in the mortals by compiling information into a documentary. The truth would prevail, he'd said as he flicked off ashes of his cigarette. He'd added one last warning before leaving. "You three aren't the only ones left. There's still some roaming the empty districts."

Tsuna had accepted that without much dread. He was sure that with Kyouya-san and maybe even Reborn's help, they could protect the surviving civilization they were building.

And then Reborn was there in front of them, blank-faced as a brick wall.

And Kyouya-san was stepping in front of Tsuna with tonfas at hand, slitted eyes gleaming.

Tsuna coughed behind him, a barely recognizable word as "—_kimono—" _in his voice_. _

Kyouya-san frowned and with disgust, stepped aside. He addressed his older brother, "Tsunayoshi is under Namimori jurisdiction, being a former resident and student in my city. Attempting to contaminate him with your presence will result in a heavy penalty and I will not hesitate to carry it out against your useless corpse."

Reborn threw him a calculating look. "Tsunayoshi is my hatchling and was, from the beginning, intended to be mine. I have spent much time keeping him stable in his chemical egg and I will not see my work wasted. If you so much as harm one little hair on his head, I will take the appropriate payment in ten times the pounds of flesh carved from your carcass."

The siblings glared at each other.

Then nodded.

Kyouya-san then squeezed Tsuna's shoulder and left to give them twenty-five minutes of privacy.

Tsuna bit his lip, to stop from cracking up. The Hibari siblings were the type to beat each other senseless for _fun_. But when a common enemy appeared, they would gang up on that man. And if it was a common lover? He quickly sobered and smiled hesitantly at Reborn. "Um. Hello." As much as he loved Kyouya-san, he wondered what life would have been like if he had ended up with Reborn.

Reborn nodded his head. "Ciaossu."

"I know you," Tsuna blurted out. "When I was in the tank. I remember. Bits and pieces of you visiting."

The dark-eyed god blinked at him, slow lizard blinks that slightly unnerved and endeared him to Tsuna. "I was not aware of this. But I am glad." He rummaged around the pockets of his slacks with his one arm. "Here. I wanted to give this to you."

It was a dogtag with a lizard on it and a lightning bolt on its skin and a barcode underneath it. "This is my personal seal. You'll have access to most of the Pantheon bases across the continent if you show them this. And you'll be treated hospitably at any of them if you…need a place." Reborn said.

Tsuna gaped at it, at this wonderful and possibly dangerous gift. "T-thank you, I, um, this is a great honor—"

"Don't stutter," Reborn said. "It's unbecoming." He studied Tsuna for a while. "I must admit. I'm surprised. At your rapid growth. And your effect on Kyouya." He shrugged and chuckled. "Really, it's a bit of a treat to see him act like a fool. I should thank you."

Tsuna suddenly felt extremely uncomfortable and felt the urge to apologize even if he didn't really understand why. "I'm sorry. I don't want to leave Kyouya-san alone and I mean, I don't want to leave you alone either, not that you look lonely or anything or," Tsuna explained hastily at the incredulous look Reborn was giving him. He gave up and just said, "But I'll always remember you as the dark-eyed god who called me hatchling." He rose to his tiptoes and pulled at Reborn's necktie to give him a butterfly kiss on his cheek.

Behind them, Kyouya was watching and had tightened his grip on the handlebar of his motorcycle. But a deal was a deal. And Kyouya was counting down the minutes.

Reborn stared down at Tsuna bemusedly then said, "Numquam periit amor."

"Huh?" Tsuna asked.

"Take care of my little brother, Tsuna." Reborn said, ignoring Tsuna's curious expression. "Farewell, brave little fledgling. I'll come a-knocking on your door sometime in the future after I'm done rebuilding this world." He turned around and loped off to the Pantheon building.

Tsuna called out, "Um, I'd be glad to accept you sooner. In my home. At the Namimori School."

Reborn waved a hand distractedly without looking back.

And then Kyouya-san was grumbling into his ear about interfering dirtbag brothers and wiping down Tsuna's mouth with his sleeve. Then he swooped in and caught Tsuna's lips and Tsuna promptly blanked out as chapped lips closed over his own, as a heated tongue dug into his pliant mouth, and white sharp teeth nipped at his lower lip in sharp possessive bites. In broad daylight. In front of everyone.

When Tsuna blinked back into awareness, Kyouya-san had already maneuvered him onto his bike and was jamming a pink helmet on him. Tsuna blushed beet red. Kyouya-san inspected the color on his cheeks and hummed in satisfaction as he strapped the last belt under Tsuna's chin. He ordered Kusakabe, who was hovering nearby and avoiding Tsuna's eyes, to go on ahead with the Pantheon's trucks to headquarters.

Then they were driving off and Tsuna gripped Kyouya-san's waist in terror at the speed they were going. The desert landscape rolled around them, yellow and orange and brown shades blurring under a forget-me-not blue sky. The bike reverberated underneath him, a visible throb of mechanical speed and it let off its own heat and coupled with Kyouya-san's own, Tsuna would have boiled all over if not for the wind whipping past them, cooling him off.

He linked his hands around Kyouya-san's abdomen and pulled himself tight against the broad back of the titan. It was reassuring, the solid weight of him in Tsuna's arms. Reassuring to have someone to depend on.

The motorcycle slowed and then stopped.

They were at the edges of Namimori City, the electrical plant, the grave of Kronos where Tsuna's first tree had shot upwards and flowered. Byakuran's skeleton had crumbled completely underneath that tree and already its roots were slipping underground for more water, for more nutrients. Tsuna peeked out from behind Kyouya-san.

The tree's flowers were showering around them and a carpet of scrunched pink petals covered the ground.

"Um, Kyouya-san—?"

"Kyouya. Without the honorific."

Tsuna mumbled into the titan's shirt. "…Kyouya."

Kyouya turned around. "Yes?"

"Why are we here?"

Kyouya studied him, in an eerily similar gesture as Reborn, his head tilted sideways and his eyebrows raised high in question. "…Your tree has borne fruit."

"What? Really?" Tsuna squinted at the branches. And there, round squat reddish fruit hung ripened with skirts of listing petals. "Huh. Can we eat that? I mean, it's still technically made of the virus. I guess?"

Kyouya made a sick face. "I am not an herbivore. I eat meat."

"You don't eat _vegetables_?" asked Tsuna, scandalized.

"…We do not need nutrients anymore," Kyouya reminded him.

"Oh, that's true." Tsuna stared up at the fruit. "But can I eat them?" He sniffed and the flowers' heavy musk filled his head with the smell of burnt and caramelized sugar. "It smells sort of delicious. And maybe I could even spread the seeds and make more? I wonder if the fruits will affect other people? Hopefully, it won't," Tsuna rambled as he clutched at Kyouya's shirt, a bit happy and excited to see what he'd made, especially if Kyouya got to see it too.

Kyouya pulled him along until they were nearer the tree, right at the base of the large roots as thick as cars driving deep into the ground. Here, the flowers falling were thicker and the carpet of pink had completely dominated the soil and it felt like stepping on silk.

And it was starting to set off fireworks in Tsuna's stomach the way the whole scene presented it to him. Flowers. Tall, dark, and brooding Kyouya. And a practically empty spot. No way, Tsuna thought. Kyouya wasn't, he just wasn't that romant—

Tsuna bit his lip and tried to kill that surge of hope.

He didn't want to be bitterly disappointed and even then, he would still be devoted to Kyouya, would still forever follow him, and he didn't need anything else, didn't need anymore. He wasn't selfish. He wasn't greedy. He would take what he could.

It sucked that Tsuna could not stop his entire face from flaming.

Because this might very well be a d-date.

Kyouya stopped and faced him.

Blood rushing in his ears, his heart beating like drums, and his hands trembling like crazy, Tsuna listened to Kyouya speaking.

Under this blue sky and this large flowering tree, Kyouya asked a question.

Tsuna managed not to stutter his answer.

Kyouya took out a silver signet ring and clipped it onto Tsuna's collar.

It had his seal, three black horns.

Kyouya dipped into Tsuna's mouth one more time and resting his forehead on Tsuna's, he said, "From now on, you are Tsunayoshi Hibari."

0101010

Fin.

0101010

Notes:

Ring on a collar: Ring of O, worn by submissives in BDSM.

Numquam periit amor. (latin: love never dies)

"_You can live your entire life bored like you are right now, or live it happily. I want you to live, feeling, It's great to be alive!"_ -Nana Sawada, first chapter Reborn!canon.

AN: This is the last chapter. But not the Special Sequel Omake Chapter. No, you do not need to read it to see any more relevant information (aside from the foot fetish which I had to put in the omake because this chapter was already too long). But why? Why a sequel omake? To make up for the massive amounts of angst in this fic. Really, it'll just be fluff after fluff (and sex) until you're practically stuffed with it. Like a teddy bear.


End file.
